Getting started with VCF Part 11 – External Storage

I got an interesting question recently on my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) blog series. An observation was made that all of my posts highlighted vSAN as the storage for both the management domain and the workload domains. The question was whether other types of storage could be used in VCF. While we would always promote vSAN as the primary storage for VCF, the answer is yes, other storage types can be used. But I need to qualify this statement. The management domain always uses vSAN. This is automatically configured during the bring up process of the management domain and provides…

First Class Disks/Improved Virtual Disks revisited

I have been receiving a number of queries lately with regards to First Class Disks (FCD) on vSphere, also referred to as Improved Virtual Disks (IVD). Some time back, I wrote a primer on FCDs and more recently I wrote about Safekeeper, a tool for interacting with FCDs which is available on GitHub as OpenSource. This may be why there has been an increase in awareness and I am seeing more questions about FCDs. In this post, I want to address some of the most common FCD/IVD questions that I have received to date. Feel free to leave comments if…

CNS – not just for vSAN

After a very eventful VMworld, we received lots of questions about CNS, the Cloud Native Storage feature that was released with vSphere 6.7U3. Whilst most of the demonstrations and blog articles around CNS focused on vSAN, what may have been missed is that this feature also works with both VMFS and NFS datastores. For that reason, I decided to create some examples of how CNS can also bubble up information in vSphere about Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PVs) created on both VMFS and NFS datastores. Let’s begin by creating some simple policies to tag my VMFS datastore and my NFS datastore.…

See you at VMworld 2018 (Barcelona)

The content catalog has just gone live with the schedule of break-out sessions for VMworld 2018 in Barcelona. All three sessions that I presented in Las Vegas are also scheduled for the European event. I’m fortunate that I have a chance to co-present with my good friends and colleagues, Christos Karamanolis, Duncan Epping and Paudie O’Riordan. I hope you can make it along to one of these sessions if the topic is of interest.

A closer look at VVol snapshot policies on Pure Storage with vSphere 6.7

I am in the very fortunate position of having access to a Pure Storage array, and this has been recently updated to support Virtual Volumes. With my new 6.7 vSphere cluster, I finally found some time to take a closer look at Virtual Volume (VVol) snapshots on the Pure array, something that I have been meaning to do for some time. For those of you who are new to Virtual Volumes (VVols), one of the major advantages is the granularity at which certain operations can now be done. In the past, we were always dealing with data services at the…

What’s in the vSphere and vSAN 6.7 release?

Today VMware unveils vSphere version 6.7, which also includes a new version of vSAN. In this post, I am going to highlight some of the big-ticket items that are in vSphere 6.7 from a core storage perspective, and also some of the new feature that you will find in vSAN 6.7. I’ll also cover some of the new enhancements coming in Virtual Volumes (VVols).

Project Hatchway hitting the mainstream – persistent storage for containers

Regular readers will be aware that I “dabble” from time to time in the world of Cloud Native Apps. For me, a lot of this dabbling is trying to figure out how I can go about providing persistent storage to container based applications. Typically this in the shape of container volumes that are carved out of the underlying storage infrastructure, whether that is VMFS, NFS, vSAN or even Virtual Volumes. VMware Project Hatchway has enabled me to do this on multiple occasions. Project Hatchway was officially announced at VMworld 2017, but I’ve been working with this team since the early…