Virtual Volumes (VVols) and Replication/DR

There have been a number of queries around Virtual Volumes (VVols) and replication, especially since the release of KB article 2112039 which details all the interoperability aspects of VVols. In Q1 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware Products are interoperable with Virtual Volumes (VVols)?” The response includes “VMware vSphere Replication 6.0.x”. In Q2 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware Products are currently NOT interoperable with Virtual Volumes (VVols)?” The response includes “VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.x to 6.0.x” In Q4 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware vSphere 6.0.x features are…

vSphere 6.0 Storage Features Part 2: Storage DRS and SIOC

We made a number of enhancements to Storage DRS in vSphere 6.0. This article will discuss the changes and enhancements that we have made. There is a white paper which discusses many of the previous limitations of Storage DRS interoperability and I’d recommend reviewing it. Although a number of years old, it highlights many of the Storage DRS interoperability concerns. As you will see, a great any of these have now been addressed, along with some pretty interesting feature enhancements.

A closer look at Maxta

Maxta are another storage vendor that I managed to get talking to at this years’ VMworld conference in San Francisco. Although they were present at last year’s VMworld, they only announced themselves in earnest last November (11/12/13) with the release of the Maxta Storage Platform (MxSP). I spent some time with Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, Director of PM & PMM at Maxta, and he was very open in sharing details on the Maxta product. If you read the blurb on Maxta on the VMworld sponsor/exhibitor list, it states that they eliminate the need for storage arrays, provide enterprise class data services and…

DR of VMware vCenter Orchestrator

Over the past month or so, I’ve been looking at disaster recovery of some of the vCloud Suite components. My experiences of using vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager to protect and recover vCenter Operations Manager in the event of a disaster can be found here and here. Now it was time to look at vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) to see if that could be protected and recovered. In this configuration, I deployed vCO in HA mode, meaning that there were two vCenter Orchestrator servers, one running and one in standby mode. The database for vCO was an external SQL Server…

VSAN Troubleshooting Case Study

I have been doing a bunch of stuff around disaster recovery (DR) recently, and my storage of choice at both the production site and the recovery site has been VSAN, VMware Virtual SAN. I have already done a number of tests already with products like vCenter Server, vCenter Operations Manager and NSX, our network virtualization product. Next up was VCO, our vCenter Orchestrator product. I set up vSphere Replication for my vCO servers (I deployed them in a HA configuration) and their associated SQL DB VM on Friday, but when I got in Monday morning, I could not log onto…

A closer look at X-IO

My first introduction to X-IO was via Stephen Foskett’s Tech Field Days. They piqued my interest and I added them to the list of storage vendors that I wanted to check out at VMworld 2014. I started to research these guys a little more, and learnt that they are closely related to Xiotech, a SAN company that I dealt with on occasion when I worked in technical support for VMware back in the day. It seems that Xiotech acquired Seagate’s spun-out Advanced Storage Group in 2007. The guys then began to work on a different product to the Xiotech team,…

Some useful NSX Troubleshooting Tips

I’ve been working on some Disaster Recovery (DR) scenarios recently with my good pal Paudie. Last month we looked at how we might be able to protect vCenter Operation Manager, by using a vApp construct and also using IP customization. After VMworld, we turned our attention to NSX, and how we might be able to implement a DR solution for NSX. This is still a work in progress, but we did learn some very useful NSX troubleshooting commands that I thought would be worth sharing with you.