One of the break-out sessions that I presented at VMworld 2015 on Virtual SAN (VSAN) has been recorded and is now available on YouTube. I co-presented “STO4572 Conducting a Successful Virtual SAN Proof of Concept” with Julienne Pham of VMware, who did the initial part of the session. Julienne explains the planning phase, the kinds of things you need to think about, the conversations that need to take place within the organization and especially the IT team, and then what tools you have available to help you deliver the VSAN Proof Of Concept. I come on stage later on to…
Before Virtual SAN was generally available last year, the preceding VSAN beta program was one of the largest beta programs ever to take place at VMware. Today, a new beta program for VSAN was announced for 2015! This week, we’ve already announced a bunch of enhancements in VSAN 6.1 at VMworld 2015, including VSAN stretched cluster for high availability across data centers, a new 2-node VSAN model for remote-office/branch-office (ROBO), new hardware support for Intel NVMe and Diablo Ultra DIMM, and the additional features added to the health check plugin. You can read more about these announcements here. VMware has…
With the announcements just made at VMworld 2015, the embargo on Virtual SAN 6.1 has now been lifted, so we can now discuss publicly some of the new features and functionality. Virtual SAN is VMware’s software-defined solution for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). For the last number of months, I’ve been heavily involved in preparing for the Virtual SAN 6.1 launch. What follows is a brief description of what I find to be the most interesting and exciting of the upcoming features in Virtual SAN 6.1. Later on, I will follow-up with more in-depth blog posts on the new features and functionality.
Just in time for VMworld 2015, the guys over at Nexenta have given me a heads up on a new promotion that they are doing for Virtual SAN (VSAN) customers. Nexenta are giving away complimentary licenses for their NexentaStor product, which will allow Virtual SAN customers to do file services on top of VSAN.
Rubrik, who exited stealth only a few months ago, and launched their r300 series of converged data management appliance, have just announced version 2.0. You can read up of the Rubrik launch here. The 2.0 version has a new service called “Unlimited Replication” and a new appliance to the r300 series, the r348 “Hybrid Cloud Appliance”. Rubrik co-founder and CEO, Bipul Sinha, stated in the press release that Rubrik continues to transform “how companies approach data protection and recovery at scale”.
Today sees the release of the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Storage Devices (MPSD) version 6.0.2. This is exciting for me as it means that vROps now has management and monitoring features for Virtual SAN 6.0. The management pack comes with a set of default dashboards for Virtual SAN clusters, as well as the ability to monitor and create proactive alerts/notifications based on VSAN events. I took the vROps Management Pack for a spin a little while back, and used it on my own lab cluster. Included below are a few of the features that it has.
I’ve been involved in a few conversations recently regarding how VSAN trace files are handled when the ESXi host that is participating in a VSAN cluster boots from a flash device. I already did a post about some of these considerations in the past, but focused mostly on USB/SD. However SATADOM was not included in this discussion, as we did not initially support SATADOM in VSAN 5.5, and only announced SATADOM support for VSAN 6.0. It seems that there are some different behaviors that need to be taken into account between the various flash boot devices, which is why I…