This past week, my buddy Paudie and I have been neck-deep in Cloudera/Hadoop, with a view to getting it successfully deployed on vSphere. The purpose of this was solely a learning exercise, to try to understand what operational considerations need to be taking into account when running Hadoop on top vSphere. These operational considerations range from items such as maintenance mode, rack awareness, high availability, replication and protection of the data. Both Cloudera/Hadoop and vSphere offers ways to do all of this, so the longer term objective is to figure out whether or not these features are compatible, and whether…
Today VMware has another cloud launch update, and this one is significant for many reasons. Our underlying goals of VMware Cloud are many. From an infrastructure perspective, the goal is to provide operational consistency no matter where the application is running, whether this is from an automation, security or governance perspective. But one thing that is often overlooked is what this operational consistency means to the developer. The goal, I feel, is to make it as simple as possible for developers to create their apps and make it as simple as possible to consume services that they might need for…
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to many readers that virtualization has brought (and continues to bring) huge benefits with regards to data center efficiency. I’m sure you are all aware of how virtualization allows you to do more with your servers; no more single server – single application paradigms. No longer do you have huge amount of compute resources left idle on your servers. By being able to run many operating systems and many applications simultaneously on the same single server (server consolidation), virtualization brought a halt to server sprawl and data center expansion for many of…
Some time ago, I wrote about which policy changes can trigger a rebuild of an object. This came up again recently, as it was something that Duncan and I covered in our VMworld 2017 session on top 10 vSAN considerations. In the original post (which is over 3 years old now), I highlighted items like increasing the stripe width, growing the read cache reservation (relevant only to hybrid vSAN) and changing FTT when the read cache reservation is non-zero (again only relevant to hybrid vSAN) which led to a rebuild of the object (or components within the object). The other…
Well, I’m delighted to have been invited to present at quite a few VMUGs recently, so I thought I’d share the details of them with you here. I’ve been working on my presentation which is called “What is happening in the world of VMware Storage?”. In fact, there is a lot going on, not just in the world of vSAN and VVols, but also in core storage as well as in cloud native storage. So in my 1 hour slot, I’ll be trying to update you on all of this goodness. No easy task, but I’m always up for a…
Hot on the heels on Pure Storage’s recent announcement on Virtual Volume (VVol) support, I wanted to take a closer look at their VVol implementation for myself. Thanks to the support team over at Pure, they were able to very quickly update our lab array to the latest release that has support for VVols. Once this upgrade was complete (which was all done remotely), I wanted to go ahead and register the VASA provider with my vCenter server. You can read more about the role of VASA here. I wanted to step through the process manually, rather than use the…
A short post today to let you know about a new VMware training class that I helped to create. This new class is called VMware vSAN Production Operations, and is a new 3 day class delivered by our Education Services division. As you can imagine from the title, this class is geared towards administrators who are responsible for managing vSAN on a daily basis in a production environment. The class focuses primarily on operational considerations such as storage policy change impacts, hardware monitoring and replacement, scaling up and scaling out the cluster, data services (e.g. encryption), maintenance mode considerations and…