Last week during a visit to VMware headquarters in Palo Alto, I had the opportunity to catch up with our engineering team who are responsible for developing storage solutions for Docker and Kubernetes running on vSphere. I have written about our Docker volume driver for vSphere and Kubernetes on vSphere already, but it’s been a while since I caught up with the team, and obviously more and more enhancements are being added all the time. I thought it might be useful to share the improvements with you here. There also seems to be some concerns raised about the availability of…
A short post to let you know about some upcoming speaking engagements that I am doing over the next couple of weeks. First up, I will be speaking at the TechUG, or Technology User Group event next week. This event will be held on Thursday, November 26th. It will be held in the Westin Hotel in the heart of Dublin city, Ireland. There is a really good agenda for this event (which is not a VMware centric event), that you can find at this link here. I personally will be speaking about Virtual SAN (VSAN), VMware’s hyper-converged compute and storage…
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.
As many of you are aware, I was at VMworld in San Francisco last week. I wrote a number of articles about some VMware storage announcements, such as EVO:RAIL, VAIO and VVols. However there were, as usual, quite a number of storage vendors at this years conference. One of the vendors that I really want to learn more about was Kaminario, an all flash array vendor that I’d heard a lot of things about. I had the pleasure of spending some time at the Kaminario booth with Shai Maskit who is a senior Product Manager with Kaminario. I posed my…
Many of you will be aware that Storage DRS uses Storage I/O Control (SIOC) for load balancing based on I/O metrics. However a statement in one of our white papers has raised a few questions recently with both our customers and partners. The statement is as follows: “Queue depth throttling is not compatible with Storage DRS”. (pg.34) from http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.5.pdf. This assertion led many to believe that Storage DRS would not work well with Adaptive Queuing (AQ), another of VMware’s queue depth throttling mechanisms. However internally, many felt that this wasn’t a true statement, but some work was needed to verify…
I’m sure Frank Denneman will need no introduction to many of you reading this article. Frank & I both worked in the technical marketing organization at VMware, before Frank moved on to PernixData last year and I moved to Integration Engineering here at VMware. PernixData FVP 1.0 released last year, and I did a short post on them here. I’d seen a number of people discussing new FVP features in the community, especially after PernixData’s co-founder Satyam’s presentation at Tech Field Day 5 (#TFD5). I decided to reach out to Frank, and see if he could spare some time to…
[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…