What’s new in vSAN 6.7U3?

With all the buzz at VMworld 2019 this week, I thought I would highlight some of the cool new features that have been introduced with vSAN 6.7U3. In this release, there are 3 areas of focus, namely Unified Management, Intelligent Operations and Enhanced Performance and Availability. Let’s take a closer look at each of these. Unified Management Cloud Native Storage The primary initiative to providing unified management is our Cloud Native Storage feature. I’ve already blogged about CNS in a previous post. This is basically giving our vSAN Administrators the ability to gain insight into both virtual machine storage as…

Introducing vSphere Cloud Native Storage (CNS)

I’m delighted to be able to share with you that, coinciding with the release of vSphere 6.7 U3, VMware have also announced Cloud Native Storage (CNS). CNS builds on the legacy of the earlier vSphere Cloud Provider (VCP) for Kubernetes, and along with a new release of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) for vSphere and Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) for vSphere, CNS aims to improve container volume management and provide deep insight into how container applications running on top of vSphere infrastructure are consuming the underlying vSphere Storage. Now, there may be a lot of unfamiliar terminology in that opening…

vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive book now available in Traditional Chinese

A very short post to highlight to my Asian readers that the vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive book has now been translated into Traditional Chinese by Taiwanese company DrMaster. If you are interested in picking up a copy, we have been provided with the following links to web sites where you can purchase the book. This is opportune timing, as VMware has only just announced the newest release of vSAN, version 6.7 U3. Here are the links provided by DrMaster to online book stores in Asia where the book can be found. Tenlong Computer Books. This is the most famous…

Kubernetes Storage on vSphere 101 – Failure Scenarios

We have looked at quite a few scenarios when Kubernetes is running on vSphere, and what that means for storage. We looked at PVs, PVC, PODs, Storage Classes, Deployments and ReplicaSets, and most recently we looked at StatefulSets. In a few of the posts we looked at some controlled failures, for example, when we deleted a Pod from a Deployment or from a StatefulSet. In this post, I wanted to look a bit closer at an uncontrolled failure, say when a node crashes. However, before getting into this in too much details, it is worth highlighting a few of the…

Celebrating 20,000 #vSAN Customers – Thank you

Wow – more than 20,000 vSAN customers. What an amazing journey it has been. If you haven’t seen it, vSAN license bookings grew over 50% year-over-year in Q1 with a total customer count growing to over 20,000 (seekingalpha.com). Now we need to keep the pace and, as Duncan put it, remain the number 1 player in the hyperconverged and hybrid cloud world! As a sort of thank you to everyone who helped make this happen,  Duncan and I have decided to lower the price of our vSAN Deep Dive book for 1 week. So, until Friday, June 7th, we have…

Velero and Portworx – Container Volume Backup and Restores

If you’ve been following my posts for the last week or so, you’ll have noticed my write-ups on Velero backups and restores using the new release candidate (RC). I also did a recent write-up on Portworx volumes and snapshots. In this post, I’ll bring them both together, and show you how Velero and Portworx are integrated to allow backups and restores of container applications using Portworx volumes. However, first, let’s take a step back. As was highlighted to me recently, all of this is very new to a lot of people, so let’s spend a little time setting the context.…

A first look at the Couchbase Operator

A few weeks back, I took a look at Heptio Velero, formely known as Ark. Velero provides backup and restore capabilities for cloud native applications. During that research, I used a Couchbase DB as my application of choice for backup/restore. After speaking to Couchbase regarding that blog post, they strongly recommended I try the new Couchbase operator rather than the StatefulSet method that I was using for the application. Couchbase talk about the advantages of the operator approach over StatefulSets here. Now, while Couchbase provide steps on how to deploy Couchbase with their operator, they create it in the default…