This is an interesting announcement for those of you following emerging storage technologies. We’ve been talking about flash technologies for some time now, but for the most part flash has been either an SSD or PCIe device. Well, we now have another format – DIMM-based flash storage device. And VMware now supports it.
I was discussing this issue with a good friend of mine over at Tintri, Fintan Comyns. Fintan was seeing some strange behaviour with the cloning on Windows 2008 R2 Guest OS running in virtual machines using the Tintri VAAI-NAS plugin, and wanted to know if this behaviour was normal or not. Basically what he was seeing was that a clone operation of a virtual machine was not being offloaded. Rather, he was seeing two separate independent snapshots (snapshots that were not in a chain, but both pointing to the base VMDK) were getting created at the time of the cloning…
Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with Mike Koponen and Dean Steadman of Fusion-io. I had met with Mike and Dean at VMworld 2013, and spoke to them about the Fusion-io acquisition of NexGen storage earlier last year, and what plans Fusion-io had for this acquisition. Well, the result is ioControl Hybrid Storage, and we discussed some of the architecture of ioControl as well as a number of vSphere integration points.
This is an issue which has caught a number of customers out during the Virtual SAN beta, so will probably catch some folks out when the product goes live too. One of the requirements for Virtual SAN (VSAN) is to allow multicast traffic on the VSAN network between the ESXi host participating in the VSAN Cluster. However, as per our engineering lead on VSAN, multicast is only used for relatively infrequent metadata operations. For example, object creation, change in object status after a failure and publication of statistics such as a significant change of free disk space (the publication of…
For those of you participating in the VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) beta, this is a reminder that there is a VSAN Design & Sizing Guide available on the community forum. It is part of the Virtual SAN (VSAN) Proof of Concept (POC) Kit, and can be found by clicking this link here. The guide has recently been updated to include some Host Memory Requirements as we got this query from a number of customers participating in the beta. The actual host memory requirement directly related to the number of physical disks in the host and the number of disk groups…
I had a customer reach out to me recently to discuss VMware’s Storage I/O Control behavior and Adaptive Queuing behavior and how it works with QLogic’s Execution Throttle feature. To be honest, I didn’t have a good understanding of the Execution Throttle mechanism from QLogic so I did a little research to see if this feature inter-operates with VMware’s own I/O congestion management features.
[Updated] This is a very short post as I only learnt about this recently myself. I thought it was only available in vSphere 5.5 but it appears to be in vSphere 5.1 too. Anyhow Storage DRS now has a new setting that allows you to configure the default VM affinity setting. Historically, VMDKs from the same virtual machine were always kept together on the same datastore by default; you had to set a VMDK anti-affinity rule to keep them apart. Now you can set a default for this option, which can either be to keep VMDKs together on the same…