Video of HCI Spotlight Session from #VMworld now available #HCI3551KE

This week at VMworld in Barcelona, I was honored to  be able to  co-present the HCIBU Spotlight Session with our GM and SVP, John Gilmartin. I noticed that the full video is now available online on the VMworld Video site. If you want to learn more about how to Future Proof your Infrastructure with vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation, give it a watch. The cool demos, showing Cloud Native Storage, Site Recovery Manager support for vVols and Project Magna auto-tuning vSAN all start around the 30 minute mark. The full video is available here. Enjoy!

Site Recovery Manager support for vVols – Tech Preview from VMworld 2019

Regular readers will be aware that I have been spending a lot of my time on Cloud Native Storage topics these days, whether it is bubbling up how Kubernetes clusters are consuming vSphere storage through our new CNS feature in vSphere 6.7U3, or using Velero to do lots of things like backups/restores/application mobility. However something I have been passionate about for quite a number of years now is our Virtual Volumes (vVols) feature. And while it has been rather quiet over the past couple of years, I was thrilled to see us deliver a tech preview for supporting Site Recovery…

Vendors I plan to check out at #VMworld 2018

It’s here. VMworld 2018 is underway. I’ve just spent a great week in Nashville, a place I have wanted to visit for the longest time. Now it’s almost time to head to the airport and catch my flight to Las Vegas. As is usual at this time of year, there are a lot of announcements and briefing requests. In this post, I am going to share some of the announcements/briefings that I have been privy to, and share some of the things (mostly in the storage space) that I plan to learn more about over the next few days.

Upcoming VMUG webinar – vSphere 6.5 Core Storage

A quick note to let you know that I am co-presenting on an upcoming VMUG webinar with my good pal, Cody Hosterman, from Pure Storage. The subject is vSphere 6.5 Core Storage, and this is very much the same topic that we presented at VMworld 2017. We will cover new limits, deed dive into VMFS-6 and VAAI enhancements (including automated UNMAP), cover what’s new in NFS and iSCSI, and then finish with an overview of what we’ve done in the NVMe space. The webinar takes place on Thursday, November 16, 2017 at 11:00 AM US Central Standard Time. Cody and…

Virtual Volumes (VVols) and Replication/DR

There have been a number of queries around Virtual Volumes (VVols) and replication, especially since the release of KB article 2112039 which details all the interoperability aspects of VVols. In Q1 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware Products are interoperable with Virtual Volumes (VVols)?” The response includes “VMware vSphere Replication 6.0.x”. In Q2 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware Products are currently NOT interoperable with Virtual Volumes (VVols)?” The response includes “VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.x to 6.0.x” In Q4 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware vSphere 6.0.x features are…

vSphere 6.0 Storage Features Part 2: Storage DRS and SIOC

We made a number of enhancements to Storage DRS in vSphere 6.0. This article will discuss the changes and enhancements that we have made. There is a white paper which discusses many of the previous limitations of Storage DRS interoperability and I’d recommend reviewing it. Although a number of years old, it highlights many of the Storage DRS interoperability concerns. As you will see, a great any of these have now been addressed, along with some pretty interesting feature enhancements.

DR of VMware vCenter Orchestrator

Over the past month or so, I’ve been looking at disaster recovery of some of the vCloud Suite components. My experiences of using vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager to protect and recover vCenter Operations Manager in the event of a disaster can be found here and here. Now it was time to look at vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) to see if that could be protected and recovered. In this configuration, I deployed vCO in HA mode, meaning that there were two vCenter Orchestrator servers, one running and one in standby mode. The database for vCO was an external SQL Server…