The last of my VMworld 2017 sessions is now available for viewing. This is the vSAN Networking session, which I co-presented with Andreas Scherr. Andreas is responsible for taking care of all of our vSAN proof-of-concept deployments in EMEA. In this session we cover many aspects of vSAN networking design and configuration, such as NIC teaming, load balancing, supported topologies, and so on. The session includes some very interesting demos, highlighting what can go wrong when the networking is not optimal. Hope you like it, and feedback is always welcome.
A quick note to let you know that a recorded version of the VMworld 2017 session “Top 10 things to know about vSAN” is now available on YouTube. I delivered this with my colleague, Duncan Epping and in this recording we talk about a bunch of things that we feel are important to know about vSAN, but which you may not be aware of. Hope you like it.
After publishing the vSAN Networking Guide earlier this year, Paudie O’Riordain and I received numerous questions regarding support on having different stretched clusters hosting each other’s witness appliances. These queries arose because we discussed a 2-node (ROBO) topology which allowed this to sort of configuration (i.e. the cross hosting of witnesses) via special request. But in the networking guide, we explicitly stated that this was not supported with vSAN stretched clusters. However, after some further testing by our engineering teams, we can now relax this restriction if there are 4 independent sites hosting the different stretched clusters. In this case,…
Last week, I was rolling out Horizon View v7.1 on my new vSAN 6.6.1 all-flash configuration in the lab. Now, one of the pet peeves a few of us have had with this configuration was that a warning was always reported around read cache reservations on all-flash vSAN. Of course, read cache is irrelevant to all-flash (AF) configurations as it does not use a read cache; this is only applicable to hybrid vSAN configurations. This is why it was such as annoyance.
Many regular readers will be aware of new encryption features added recently to VMware’s portfolio, such as vSAN data-at-reset encryption and vSphere VM encryption in vSphere 6.5. I had to return to a configuration task that I hadn’t done in a while, which was the deployment of a new Key Management Server (KMS) on my vSphere 6.5 / vSAN 6.6.1 setup. I had done this a few times before, but it has been a while and I’d forgotten what exactly I’d needed to do, so I decided to document the steps in this post for future reference. Those of you…
For those of you who may have missed it, vSphere 6.5U1 was released very recently. This new release of vSphere also brought along a new release of vSAN, version 6.6.1. Included in this release are a few really nice features that did not make it into the major 6.6 release of vSAN that we had earlier this year. However some of these features are quite significant, especially as we work to make HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) more and more easy to deploy, configure and manage.
Like I usually do around this time of year, I wanted to share with you my plans for this year’s VMworld in Las Vegas. Hey, you might even like what you read about my sessions enough to sign up for one 🙂 Once again, I am completely HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) and storage focused. But what is really exciting for me this year is that I have some new people to co-present with. First of all, I’m presenting a vSAN network deep-dive with Andreas Scherr. Andreas manages all of our vSAN Proof-Of-Concepts in EMEA, and is a very smart cookie indeed.…