My good pal Paudie and I are back in full customer[0] mode these past few weeks, testing out lots of new and upcoming features in future release of vSAN. Our testing led us to building a new vSAN stretched cluster, with 5 nodes on the preferred site, 5 nodes on the secondary site, and of course the obligatory witness node. Now, it had been a while since we put vSAN stretched cluster through its paces. The last time was the vSAN 6.1 release, which led us to create some additional sections on stretched cluster for the vSAN Proof Of Concept…
One of the key new features of vSphere 6.5 is vSphere VM Encryption, a mechanism to encrypt all virtual machine files. This mechanism not only encrypts the VMDK, but also the metadata files and core dumps associated with a VM. Now, there would not be much point in sending an encrypted core dump file to VMware for analysis, so a mechanism has been put in place to allow these files to be recrypted using a password before sending them to VMware. The password can then be shared with VMware to allow us to examine the core dumps. This is how…
This is something very interesting which gained support with the release of vSAN 6.5. It will be of interest to those customers who boot their ESXi hosts from USB/SD devices, and also have vSAN configured. One long-standing restriction with this configuration was the inability to boot from USB/SD when the amount of memory in the host is over 512GB. This is because we could not guarantee that the memory dump would fit in the pre-sized core dump partition. Well, now we have the ability to resize the core dump partition, even when it resides on a USB/SD device. The guidance…
Many readers will be aware that John Nicholson and Pete Fletcha of the VMware Storage and Availability Tech Marketing team run a weekly podcast show called Virtually Speaking. This week I am back as a guest on their show, alongside Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage. We discuss a lot of the new core storage features in vSphere 6.5, which were detailed in a co-produced white paper that we recently created. You can read about how to get the white paper here. You can listen to the podcast through the player below. I hope you enjoy it.
Regular readers will know about vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC for short), as I have written a number of articles around my experiences with this new VMware product. Although announced with vSphere 6.5, VIC did not GA at the same time. However, VIC v0.8 is now generally available for vSphere 6.5.
Thanks to my friends over at VMUG Italia, my recorded presentation on Storage Challenges with Cloud Native Apps is now available. This was delivered at the VMUG UserCon event held in Milan, Italy, and which took place on November 15th. In this session I go through various container related projects that are underway at VMware (docker volume driver, vSphere Integrated Containers, Admiral, Harbor and Photon Platform), as well as how we are providing persistent storage for containers deployed on these products. Hope you enjoy it.
Many of you will be aware of the new core storage features that were introduced in vSphere 6.5. If not, you can learn about them in this recently published white paper. Without doubt, the feature that has created the most amount of interest is automated unmap (finally, I hear you say!). Now a few readers have asked about the following comment in the automated unmap section. Automatic UNMAP is not supported on arrays with UNMAP granularity greater than 1MB. Auto UNMAP feature support is footnoted in the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide (HCL). So where do you find this info in…