Why upgrade vSAN? Here is a list of features, release by release.

I was with one of our large EMEA customers last week, and we talked quite a bit about the evolution of vSAN. This customer is already one of our larger vSAN customers with very many clusters, and many, many nodes. They have also been a great vSAN reference for us, having first deployed the initial vSAN 5.5 release. One point that hit home was that they found it was quite difficult to determine the various features and enhancements that were introduced in each vSAN release. They mentioned that having a quick reference would be useful as they could use it…

Essential Virtual SAN (6.2) available for pre-order

Our friends over at Pearson and VMware Press have informed us that the second edition of the Essential Virtual SAN book (that I wrote with Duncan Epping) is now available for pre-order on Amazon. It looks like it will be available on June 13th, but VMware Press have told us that they will do what they can to pull the date in a little closer. This new edition covers all of the new features added to Virtual SAN, up to the latest (yet to be released) VSAN 6.2. Here’s some blurb on the new edition, which gives a little insight…

Compare and Contrast – VSAN and VVols

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to meet with a number of VMware customers in both Singapore and in the UAE. Most of the sessions were enablement and education type sessions, where there was a lot of white-boarding of VSAN (VMware’s hyper-converged infrastructure product) and Virtual Volumes (VVols – Software Defined Storage or SDS for the storage arrays). This wasn’t a sales session; I’m not in sales. The objective of these sessions was simply to educate. I guess when you are immersed in this stuff 24×7, it easy to fall into the trap of believing that everyone is well…

VSAN 6.2 Part 4 – IOPS limit for object

VSAN 6.2 has a new quality of service mechanism which we are referring to as “IOPS limit for object”. Through a policy setting, a customer can set an IOPS limit on a per object basis (typically VMDK) which will guarantee that the object will not be able to exceed this amount of IOPS. This is very useful if you have a virtual machine that might be consuming more than its fair share of resources. This policy setting will ensure that there are “guard rails” placed on this virtual machine so it doesn’t impact other VMs, or impact the overall performance…