Recently I was looking for a way to consume the Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) cmdlets in PowerCLI. I wanted to see if I could provision a VM from a Template onto my vSAN datastore with a particular policy rather than simply change it after it was deployed. It wasn’t as easy as I thought, as some of the commands I tried would only change the VM Home Namespace to the new policy, and leave the disks with the default datastore policy. And when I tried to clone a new VM from a template, I couldn’t get the VM to…
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…
Yes, it’s that time of year again. VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas is taking place next month. Once again, as per previous years, I will be co-presenting on a few sessions. It will be no surprise that, once again, my sessions are focused on storage, hyper-convergence and predominantly vSAN. However, this year I will also be presenting with my CTO and VMware Fellow, Christos Karamanolis, for the very first time. Without further ado, let me go through my sessions in a bit more details, and if they look interesting to you, feel free to sign up. I also included a…
As I am going to be doing some talks around next-gen applications at this year’s VMworld event, I took the opportunity to revisit Pivotal Container Services (PKS) to take a closer look at how we can set persistent volumes on container based applications. Not only that, but I also wanted to leverage the vSphere Cloud Provider feature which is part of our Project Hatchway initiative. I’ve written about Project Hatchway a few times now, but in a nutshell this allows us to create persistent container volumes on vSphere storage, and at the same time set a storage policy on the…
As part of my preparation work for VMworld 2018, I was looking into how one might be able to automate the deployment of VMs from vRealize Automation 7.4 with an appropriate policy for consuming the under-lying storage. In my case, this underlying storage was vSAN 6.7 (and vSphere 6.7), so I wanted to be able to select a vSAN policy for my VM Home namespace and disks. Fortunately, there is a vRealize Orchestration (vRO) plugin to do just that called the vRA SPBM Integration plugin. But, once I had this plugin installed, and followed the instructions, I hit a snag.…
I wanted to follow-up on my recent Minio S3 post with steps on how to implement a reverse-proxy using Nginx. The purpose of this is to allow an end-user to connect to a single Minio server, and have that connection be redirected in a round-robin fashion to all of my other 16 Minio servers in my Minio S3 deployment. This was surprisingly very straight-forward, and only required a handful of changes to my nginx.conf file. If you want to review the initial deployment steps, you can find these here in my original post. Let’s go through the steps to set…
Some time back, I looked at what it would take to run a container based Minio S3 object store on top of vSAN. This involved using our vSphere Docker Volume Server (aka Project Hatchway, and the details can be found here. However, I wanted to evaluate what it would take to scale out the Minio S3 object store on top of vSAN, paying particular attention to features like distribution and availability, and to examine the various data services that can be provided by both vSAN and Minio. I also wanted to take advantage of the new host-pinning feature in vSAN…