Data Services Manager version 2.1 now available

It gives me great pleasure to announce the availability of Data Services Manager version 2.1. The team have been working tirelessly on this release to deliver on new features and functionality. In this post, I will cover a number of the big ticket items found in this release. In later posts, I will delve into these features in more detail, so watch this space. Visit the DSM section of the Broadcom Support Portal to download the product. VMware Cloud Foundation customers are automatically entitled to DSM, and in this release we are making it even easier to stand up your…

New Book: VMware vSAN 8.0U1 Express Storage Architecture now available

I am delighted to announce the availability of a new book, VMware vSAN 8.0U1 Express Storage Architecture. Along with my colleagues, Duncan Epping and Pete Koehler, we have updated the vSAN deep dive book to focus on the new vSAN architecture which was announced with the vSphere & vSAN 8.0 releases. We held off publication as we were aware of a number of upcoming enhancements in 8.0U1. Now that this release is generally available, the book includes all of the new features and functionality found in the 8.0U1 release. Please note that we made a decision not to focus on…

vSphere with Tanzu – Multi-Zone Preview

One of the most interesting announcements for me at VMware Explore 2022 was around the introduction of vSphere Zones. This feature, when it becomes available with vSphere 8.0, enables vSphere with Tanzu deployments to be rolled out across geographically dispersed vSphere clusters placed in separate racks in a single physical datacenter, as per the release notes. This provides an extra level of availability that wasn’t previously possible. This extra availability is not just for the Supervisor Cluster, but also for the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters deployed by the TKG service. And indeed, it provides additional availability to the applications running on…

Catch me at a VMUG in October

It is a long time since I wrote a post like this. However, I am thrilled to announce that I am back presenting at the VMware User Group conferences again this autumn. In October, I have been invited to speak at no fewer than four VMUG meetings around Europe. Without further ado, this is where you can hear me talk about some of our recent VMware Explore 2022 announcements regarding vSphere 8.0 and vSAN 8.0, vSphere+ and vSAN+, as well as Kubernetes on vSphere, and my thoughts around the vSphere Administrators journey towards managing Kubernetes platforms. I am delighted to…

VMware Explore 2022: What’s new in vSphere 8 & vSAN 8

VMware Explore 2022 kicked off this week. There are of course many announcements taking place across the whole suite of VMware products. In this post, I will focus primarily on the announcements related to the products that I work with on a regular basis. Those products are vSphere 8, vSphere Tanzu Standard (vSphere with Tanzu), and vSAN 8. vSphere 8 In the vSphere 8 space, the most significant announcement in my opinion is the fact that we are delivering on Project Monterey. We got our first technical preview of Project Monterey back in 2020 by the VMware CTO, Kit Colbert.…

A closer look at vSphere+ and vSAN+

At this stage, I guess that most readers will already be aware of the recent announcement around vSphere+ and vSAN+. I’m sure many readers are also aware that VMware is on a multi-cloud journey, with a goal of offering the benefits of cloud to on-premises vSphere deployments. vSphere+ and vSAN+ are some of the first steps we are taking at VMware to make this goal a reality. So what advantages does vSphere+ and vSAN+ give to customers? In this post, I will attempt to highlight some of those benefits. Centralized Management First and foremost, vSphere+ offers a new mechanism for…

MinIO Service deployment in vSphere with Tanzu [Video]

In this video, I demonstrate how to register a MinIO (S3 Object Store) vSphere Service in vSphere with Tanzu. This service is using the vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp) to provide persistent storage for the service. Once the MinIO service is registered, it may be installed on vSphere with Tanzu. This include a plugin which provides new menu options in the vSphere client. The demonstration goes on to show how to use these new menu options to deploy a MinIO S3 Object Store to a vSphere Namespace in vSphere with Tanzu.