ESXi 6.0 Update 3 is now available. This update is significant for vSAN customers as there are a number of performance related issues addressed. The KB article detailing vSAN performance improvements can be found here, and the ESXi 6.0 U3 release notes can be found here. I wouldn’t necessarily write a blog post to highlight a KB or update release, but I think the improvements that have been made to vSAN performance in this update are very significant. Improvements include enhancements to the way that we do logging. In vSAN, every I/O operation is logged before being processed. We have…
I already described how you can get started with Kubernetes natively on vSphere using the kube-up/kube-down mechanism. This was pretty straight-forward, but not ideal as it was not very reliable or easy to follow. Since writing that piece, Kubernetes have moved on to a new deployment mechanism called kubernetes-anywhere. In this post, I will show you how to deploy Kubernetes onto a vSphere environment with a vSAN datastore, using the kubernetes-anywhere utility. All of this is done from a Photon OS VM. Now in my previous example, I used the Photon OS OVA, which is a trimmed down version of…
Last week during a visit to VMware headquarters in Palo Alto, I had the opportunity to catch up with our engineering team who are responsible for developing storage solutions for Docker and Kubernetes running on vSphere. I have written about our Docker volume driver for vSphere and Kubernetes on vSphere already, but it’s been a while since I caught up with the team, and obviously more and more enhancements are being added all the time. I thought it might be useful to share the improvements with you here. There also seems to be some concerns raised about the availability of…
When I started to write this post, I looked back over my notes from previous conversations with the team at Rubrik and realized that my first conversation with them was almost 2 years ago. How time flies! I still remember meeting Rubrik at one of our VMware Partner Exchanges (PEX) in 2015, and getting a demo from Bipul Sinha (Rubrik CEO) and Julia Lee (Product Marketing). I also remember when Chris Wahl moved to Rubrik (almost 18 months ago now), thinking what a great move that was for both Chris and Rubrik. Well, when I caught up with Chris last…
Later on this month, I will be attending my first Cisco Live event. This year, it is taking place in Berlin, Germany. As part of the event, I have the opportunity to deliver a 20 minute presentation on vSAN. The session is titled “Architectural Overview of HCI powered by VMware”. Many of you will already be aware that vSAN is currently VMware’s fastest growing product. In this session, I will give an architectural overview of vSAN. The hope is to teach some of the basic principles behind vSAN, as well as many of its features. I will also talk about…
In a previous post related to multiple failures in a vSAN stretched cluster, we showed that if a failure caused the data components to be out of sync, the most recent copy of the data needs to recover before the object becomes accessible again. This is true even if there are a majority of objects available (e.g. old data copy and witness). This is to ensure that we do not recover the “STALE” copy of the data which might have out of date information. To briefly revisit the previous post, the accessibility of the object when there are multiple failures…
Sometime back I wrote an article that described what happens when an object deployed on a vSAN datastore has a policy of Number of Failures to Tolerate set to 1 (FTT=1), and multiple failures are introduced. For simplicity, lets label the three components that make up our object with FTT=1 as A, B and W. A and B are data components and W is the witness component. Let’s now assume that we lose access to component A. Components B & W are still available, and the object (e.g. a VMDK) is still available. The state of these two components (B…