A short post to let you know that I will be participating in a VSAN Roadshow event in South Africa next month. If you are in the Johannesburg or Cape Town area on October 25th and 27th respectively, and want to learn more about VMware’s Virtual SAN, you should definitely come along. I have lots to talk about, and hopefully some cool new VSAN updates from VMworld EMEA. I will also be providing an update on the various VMware projects in the Cloud Native Apps space (e.g. Photon Platform, vSphere Integrated Containers), especially around container persistence, so this may also…
With less than a month to go, I thought I’d let you know about what I’m up to at VMworld in Barcelona once more this year. Once again, the show is on at the Fira Gran Via, where it has been held since 2012. This makes it the fifth year in a row that the event has been held here. Anyway, on with what I’ll be doing. My session this year will be Virtual SAN day #2 operations. In this session, my good pal Paudie O’Riordan (that handsome guy in the picture on the left – his words, not mine)…
What a VMworld this has been for VSAN. The building momentum of this product is awesome to see, especially for those of us who have been evangelizing it from the beginning. The conversations have changed significantly this year. Previously it was all about “Why should I use VSAN?”. Now that the benefits of VSAN are obvious, the conversations this year were more technical and more around enablement, e.g. “How would I achieve X with VSAN, what are the points I need to consider when I use VSAN for Y, etc?”. As I mentioned in a previous post, this year I…
Project Harbor is another VMware initiative in the Cloud Native Apps space. In a nutshell, it allows you to store and distributes Docker images locally from within your own infrastructure. While Project Harbor provides security, identity and management of images, it also offers better performance by having the registry closer to the build and run environment for image transfers. Harbor also supports multiple deployments so that you can have images replicated between them for high availability. You can get more information (including the necessary components) about Project Harbor on github. In this post, we will deploy Project Harbor in Photon…
I’m thrilled to have had a session accepted at this year’s VMworld. I’m also going to be a co-speaker on another session. As you might have guessed, both presentations are on Virtual SAN (VSAN), and I am co-presenting both sessions with my buddy Paudie O’Riordan. In the first session, we will be talking about how to conduct a successful proof of concept (PoC) on VSAN, which will cover how to prepare, how to test, and what gotchas you need to be aware of when going through a PoC with VSAN. This session, STO7535, will take place on Wednesday, September 1st…
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…
I took another opportunity this week to look at our new Docker Volume Driver for vSphere which is currently in tech preview. This time I wanted to see how it behaved on Virtual SAN (VSAN). What I wanted to do is query the layout of the VMDK storage object on VSAN, and how an administrator can query its layout from vCenter server, but also from RVC, the Ruby vSphere Console. There might be a situation where you need to to query this information. My colleague, Wiliam Lam, has already added some information about how you can deploy volumes with different…