One of the key new features of vSphere 6.5 is vSphere VM Encryption, a mechanism to encrypt all virtual machine files. This mechanism not only encrypts the VMDK, but also the metadata files and core dumps associated with a VM. Now, there would not be much point in sending an encrypted core dump file to VMware for analysis, so a mechanism has been put in place to allow these files to be recrypted using a password before sending them to VMware. The password can then be shared with VMware to allow us to examine the core dumps. This is how…
Before I get into this post, I do want to highlight that you probably will not do this in any production type environment. The reason why I implemented this, and how this post came about, is because I was helping out with our new edition of the VSAN 6.2. Hands-On-Lab (which should be available imminently by the way). Part of the lab involved demonstrating checksum functionality. Since VSAN has a distributed architecture, there was a requirement to run commands on different hosts. Rather than having lab participants input the password each and every time to run a command on the…
I’ve had an opportunity recently to get some hands-on with HyTrust’s Data Control product to do some data encryption of virtual machine disks in my Virtual SAN 6.0 environment. I won’t deep dive into all of the “bells and whistle” details about HyTrust – my good buddy Rawlinson has already done a tremendous job detailing that in this blog post. Instead I am going to go through a step-by-step example of how to use HyTrust and show how it prevents your virtual machine disk from being snooped. In my case, I am encrypting virtual machine disks from VMs that are…
There are a couple of key concepts to understanding Virtual Volumes (or VVols for short). VVols is one of the key new storage features in vSphere 6.0. You can get an overview of VVols from this post. The first key concept is VASA – vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness. I wrote about the initial release of VASA way back in the vSphere 5.0 launch. VASA has changed significantly to support VVols, with the introduction of version 2.0 in vSphere 6.0, but that is a topic for another day. Another key feature is the concept of a Protocol Endpoint, a logical I/O…
Another hyper-converged storage company has just emerged out of stealth. Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with the team from SpringPath (formerly StorVisor), based in Silicon Valley. The company has a bunch of ex-VMware folks on-board, such as Mallik Mahalingam and Krishna Yadappanavar. Mallik and Krishna were both involved in a number of I/O related initiatives during their time at VMware. Let’s take a closer look at their new hyper-converged storage product.
Although most of my time is dedicated to Virtual SAN (VSAN) these days, I am still very interested in the core storage features that are part of vSphere. I reached out earlier to a number of core storage product managers and engineers to find out what new and exciting features are included in vSphere 6.0. The first feature is one that I know a lot of customers are waiting on – NFS v4.1. Yes, it’s finally here.
Yesterday was my first day at VMworld 2014. As usual with this event, there are simply so many interesting announcements that it is hard to keep track. However, for me, there were a few things which stood out in the storage space worth calling out. These are specifically VMware focused products and features. I know that many of our partners have also made announcements in the storage space, but for today I concentrated solely on VMware. There are the two that really caught my attention.