New steps to use HyTrust KMIP with vSAN Encryption

I’m back in the lab this week, looking at some of the newer features around vSAN. As part of this, I needed vSAN Encryption enabled, so I downloaded the latest HyTrust KeyControl appliance as this has an easy to use KMIP Server. This new version is 4.2.1,  and it has a few new steps compared to the previous versions I used, which were a little confusing to begin with. First I deployed the OVA, supplied the password, logged into the web interface, and enabled KMIP as before. However, that is where things are now a little different to before.

VMworld 2018 vSAN Roundup – Monday, Aug 27th

VMworld is now officially underway, and as usual, day 1 is full of new announcements. vSAN is no exception. There have been announcements around the next release of vSAN (6.7U1), specific vSAN improvements to VMware Cloud on AWS, a Cloudera Hadoop validation on vSAN and a beta announcements. Since we’ve had quite a number of announcements,  I though I would try to capture them all in one place.

Vendors I plan to check out at #VMworld 2018

It’s here. VMworld 2018 is underway. I’ve just spent a great week in Nashville, a place I have wanted to visit for the longest time. Now it’s almost time to head to the airport and catch my flight to Las Vegas. As is usual at this time of year, there are a lot of announcements and briefing requests. In this post, I am going to share some of the announcements/briefings that I have been privy to, and share some of the things (mostly in the storage space) that I plan to learn more about over the next few days.

Kubernetes on vSphere – Virtually Speaking Podcast Episode #86

I was delighted to be asked along to the latest Virtually Speaking podcast last week. I was invited to attend alongside the very smart Frank Denneman. Also joining us was Myles “vOdgeball sports scholarship” Gray (you’ll need to listen to the podcast to get that joke). And of course, we were joined by talented podcast hosts, Pete and John. Pete was in top form after his 1 month vac^H^H^H working in Italy (touché my friend :-D) The podcast was really a conversation about why vSphere and vSAN are ideal platforms for next-gen apps and containerized application, particularly when they are…

vSAN Stretched Cluster and Horizon View interop update

This question has come up a number of times in the past. However, there have been some updates that I personally was not aware of until last week. To cut to the chase, Horizon View 7 (all clone types) is supported with vSAN stretch cluster. This is good news. However, it is very important that customers should follow the Horizon View Reference Architecture (RA) design document and test the scalability of  Horizon 7 and vSAN Stretched Clusters in their environment.

VASA – Error while removing an entry for the provider in the providerCache

Some time ago, I hooked our Virtual Volume (VVol) capable storage array up to a vSphere 6.5 cluster. I did a few preliminary tests, such as adding the VASA (vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness) Provider, creating the VVol datastore, observing the creation of the Protocol Endpoints (PEs), and of course creating some virtual machines as a set of VVols. All went flawlessly. Then, like many other lab tests, I got distracted by a number of other things. In the meantime, the storage array vendor announced support for an updated VASA version, and we had the storage array updated to accommodate…

Catch me at a Northern England VMUG – September 2018

A short post today. There are two upcoming VMware User Group (VMUG) events to bring to your attention next month, both in the north of England. I’ve been asked to speak at both. The first is the North East England VMUG and this will take place in Newcastle on September 20th. The next is the North West England VMUG in Manchester on September 26th. At both sessions, I’ll be talking about what is happening in the world of VMware storage, so I’ll be covering vSAN, Virtual Volumes (VVols), IO Filters, Core Storage, as well as what we are doing in…