Last week, I was at our VMware Partner Exchange event in Las Vegas. Apart from my own break-out session on vSphere 5.1 storage features, I wanted to catch up with a number of our partner vendors who are doing cool things in the storage space. One of these vendors is Dot Hill, a company from Longmont, Colorado, who have been making storage arrays for a considerable amount of time now, but one which does not seem to get a huge amount of exposure. I caught up with Matt Alsip, the Technical Marketing Manager at Dot Hill, to put my customary…
Last year, NetApp announced a new host side cache accelerator feature to compliment their Virtual Storage Tiering (VST) technology. Rather than keeping all your data in flash, VST places hot data in flash while moving cold data to cheaper and slower media. NetApp are offering this as an end-to-end technology, from server to array controller (Flash Cache) to disk pools (Flash Pools). One of the major parts of this is Flash Accel, which was also announced in the latter part of last year, and is the server-side flash component of VST. On the back of their recently announced All Flash…
A little while ago, I researched a support statement regarding Software iSCSI & IPsec. After digging around a bit, I found out that the answer was no, it is not supported since we have not yet done a complete set of tests on this combination of products/features. However, in the course of my research, I came across some conflicting support statements about Software iSCSI & IPv6. KB article 1010812 – IPv6 Storage (Software iSCSI and NFS) is experimental in ESX 4.0 KB article 1021769 – VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi 4.1 supports IPv6 for use with the Service Console and VMkernel management…
I just received notification about KB article 2016122 which VMware has just published. It deals with a topic that I’ve seen discussed recently on the community forums. The symptom is that during periods of high I/O, NFS datastores from NetApp arrays become unavailable for a short period of time, before becoming available once again. This seems to be primarily observed when the NFS datastores are presented to ESXi 5.x hosts. The KB article described a work-around for the issue which is to tune the queue depth size on the ESXi hosts which will reduce I/O congestion to the datastore. By…
Nutanix have informed me that they have a new release available – Nutanix OS 2.6.4 (NOS is the new name for the previously named Nutanix Complete Cluster). They are looking for all their customers to proactively move to this new release. Although Nutanix also have NOS 3.0 release on the cards, existing customers will first need to move to version 2.6.4 in order to be in a position to migrate to 3.0. If that is not reason enough, the 2.6.4 release also includes the following new features:
This came up in a conversation today. Does VMware’s Software iSCSI implementation support Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) in vSphere 5.1? Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) secures IP communications coming from and arriving at an ESXi host. Although KB article 1021769 states that IPv6 is compatible with Software iSCSI, it doesn’t state whether or not IPsec is supported with Software iSCSI. To find this information, you have to reach for the vSphere Security Guide. Under the section ‘Securing iSCSI Devices Through Authentication’, it states: ESXi does not support Kerberos, Secure Remote Protocol (SRP), or public-key authentication methods for iSCSI. Additionally, it does not…
If you are planning to upgrade to vSphere 5.1, you need to pay attention to this, especially if you have assigned static MAC addresses to your virtual machines. After upgrading to vSphere 5.1, VMs with statically assigned MAC address may fail to power on with the error: “The MAC address entered is not in the valid range.”