Norway VMware User Group Meetings – May/June 2017

I’m delighted to report that I’ve been invited to speak at the upcoming Norway VMUG (VMware User Group) meetings. These take place in three different cities over the week of May 29th (week 22), with three meetings in three days. On Tuesday, May 30th, the Oslo VMUG will take place. On May 31st, it’s the turn of the Trondheim VMUG and we will finish with the Bergen VMUG on June 1st. I am going to broaden the scope of the conversation at these VMUGs, and talk about Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) in general. Of course, we will look at…

Erasure Coding and Quorum on vSAN

I was looking at the layout of RAID-5 object configuration the other day, and while these objects were deployed on vSAN with 4 components, something caught my eye. It wasn’t the fact that there were 4 components, which is what one would expect since we implement RAID-5 as a 3+1, i.e. 3 data segments and 1 parity segment. No, what caught my eye was that one of the components had a different vote count. Now, RAID-5 and RAID-6 erasure coding configurations are not the same as RAID-1. With RAID-1, we deploy multiple copies of the data depending on how many…

Storage for containers with VMware? You got it!

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…

vRealize Automation SPBM Integration Solution v2.1.0 is out

Last week I wrote about the new vSAN management pack for vRealize Operations. This week sees another nice new storage feature/solution released. This time it is a solution to integrate vRealize Automation and Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM). For those of you who saw the VMworld 2016 keynotes, you may remember Yanbing Li demonstrating the ability to have a VM move to a completely new datacenter, based on storage policy compliance. In essence, if a VM exits compliance with its storage policy (for whatever reason),  vRealize Automation SPBM integration can initiate a migration of this VM  to a completely different…

Can Storage Policies be used with VIC?

The answer is an emphatic yes. One can absolutely use storage policies with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). However, there is currently no way to specify a policy at the docker CLI when creating a container (at this time). Therefore one would have to deploy the VCH, then deploy the container, and then finally modify the storage policy as appropriate. My understanding is that consideration is being given to a way to do this at deployment time, but at the present, it involves a number of steps. Let’s discuss them in turn.

Joint Virtual SAN/Rubrik White Paper

I’m delighted to announce the availability of a joint Rubrik and VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) white paper. Both Rubrik and Virtual SAN epitomize many of the features and characteristics of Software Defined Storage, in particular simplifying storage and backup/restore for vSphere Administrators. Other features include abstracting the underlying storage into one large pool, and consuming/utilizing that underlying storage through policies, whether these are for virtual machine deployment or backup. If you are completely new to VSAN and/or Rubrik, this paper gives a good explanation of both technologies. The paper also explains how Rubrik and VSAN work seamlessly together to back…

VSAN 6.2 Part 12 – VSAN 6.1 to 6.2 Upgrade Steps

I’ve already written a few articles around this, notably on stretched cluster upgrades and on-disk format issues. In this post, I just wanted to run through the 3 distinct upgrade steps in a little more detail, and show you some useful commands that you can use to monitor the progress. In a nutshell, the steps are: Upgrade vCenter Server to 6.0U2 (VSAN 6.2) Upgrade ESXi hosts to ESXi 6.0U2 (VSAN 6.2) Perform rolling upgrade of on-disk format from V2 to V3 across all hosts