I’m thrilled to have had a session accepted at this year’s VMworld. I’m also going to be a co-speaker on another session. As you might have guessed, both presentations are on Virtual SAN (VSAN), and I am co-presenting both sessions with my buddy Paudie O’Riordan. In the first session, we will be talking about how to conduct a successful proof of concept (PoC) on VSAN, which will cover how to prepare, how to test, and what gotchas you need to be aware of when going through a PoC with VSAN. This session, STO7535, will take place on Wednesday, September 1st…
I’m delighted to announce the availability of a joint Rubrik and VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) white paper. Both Rubrik and Virtual SAN epitomize many of the features and characteristics of Software Defined Storage, in particular simplifying storage and backup/restore for vSphere Administrators. Other features include abstracting the underlying storage into one large pool, and consuming/utilizing that underlying storage through policies, whether these are for virtual machine deployment or backup. If you are completely new to VSAN and/or Rubrik, this paper gives a good explanation of both technologies. The paper also explains how Rubrik and VSAN work seamlessly together to back…
I took another opportunity this week to look at our new Docker Volume Driver for vSphere which is currently in tech preview. This time I wanted to see how it behaved on Virtual SAN (VSAN). What I wanted to do is query the layout of the VMDK storage object on VSAN, and how an administrator can query its layout from vCenter server, but also from RVC, the Ruby vSphere Console. There might be a situation where you need to to query this information. My colleague, Wiliam Lam, has already added some information about how you can deploy volumes with different…
2 years after the first edition, it’s finally here. The second edition of “Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN)”, the book I co-authored with Duncan Epping, is now available. The folks over at vmusketeers did a rather nice review of the book here. Feel free to take a look at what they think of the book beforehand if you wish. If you do decide to purchase a copy, we’d love to get your feedback/review on Amazon. At the moment, it is only the kindle version that is available. The hard copy of the book should be available at the end of this…
This is a really cool development. There is now a docker volume driver for vSphere which we just made public last night, and is now available for tech preview. This will allow customers to address persistent storage requirements for Docker containers in vSphere environments. Basically, it allows you to create a VMDK, and use this VMDK as a persistent storage volume for containers. In the following posts, I will outline the steps involved in getting started with Docker Volume Driver for vSphere. In essence, there are 4 steps: Install the docker volume plugin on ESXi host. I was running ESXi…
Every week, the VMware Storage and Availability Tech Marketing team (John Nicholson and Pete Fletcha) run a podcast show called the Virtually Speaking Podcast. This week I am a guest on their show, alongside Rich Peterson of FlashSoft. We spoke about VAIO, the new vSphere APIs for I/O Filters. While I described some basic features on VAIO, Rich describing the Cache Acceleration VAIO implementation for FlashSoft 4.0, created by the FlashSoft team over at SanDisk. This is the first fully certified VAIO implementation and I wrote an article about it last month that you can read here if you wish.…
I spent the last 10 days in the VMware HQ in Palo Alto, and had lots of really interesting conversations and meet-ups, as you might imagine. One of those conversations revolved around the minimum VSAN configurations. Let’s start with the basics. 2-node: There are two physical hosts for data and a witness appliance hosted elsewhere. Data is placed on the physical hosts, and the witness appliance holds the witness components only, never any data. 3-node: There are three physical hosts, and the data and witness components are distributed across all hosts. This configuration can support a number of failures to…