I had a query about this recently, and actually it is a topic that I have not looked at for some time. Those of you configuring virtual machine disks may have seen references to these different configuration options and may have wondered how they affect the behavior of the virtual machine. Read on to find out the subtleties between Independent Persistent Mode and Independent Non-persistent Mode disks, and what impact they may have.
Many of you in the storage field will be aware of a limitation with the maximum amount of open files on a VMFS volume. It has been discussed extensively, with a blog articles on the vSphere blog by myself, but also articles by such luminaries as Jason Boche and Michael Webster. In a nutshell, ESXi has a limited amount of VMFS heap space by default. While you can increase it from the default to the maximum, there are still some gaps. When you create very many VMDKs on a very large VMFS volume, the double indirect pointer mechanism to address…
Followers of my blog will have seen a number of articles posted recently about storage vendors that I managed to catch up with at this year’s VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas. In the last in this series of articles, I managed to spend some time with the folks from GreenBytes. The timing was very opportune, as GreenBytes just made a major announcement to their portfolio, namely their new vIO, the virtual storage appliance version of their IO Offload Engine solution for desktop virtualization. I met up with Michael Robinson (VP, Marketing), Jeff Eberhard (Sr. Systems Engineer) and Steve O’Donnell…
Another storage vendor that I finally managed to catch up with at this year’s VMware Partner Exchange was Tegile. I was curious about the name, and I learnt that Tegile was a merging of the terms Technology and Agility. Tegile is another vendor that I have seen at various events, but have not had an opportunity to catch up with them in person and learn about their products. This time, I got an opportunity to catch up with Rob Commins (VP of Marketing) and Mike Recker of Tegile, and put a few questions to them.
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…