Before Virtual SAN was generally available last year, the preceding VSAN beta program was one of the largest beta programs ever to take place at VMware. Today, a new beta program for VSAN was announced for 2015! This week, we’ve already announced a bunch of enhancements in VSAN 6.1 at VMworld 2015, including VSAN stretched cluster for high availability across data centers, a new 2-node VSAN model for remote-office/branch-office (ROBO), new hardware support for Intel NVMe and Diablo Ultra DIMM, and the additional features added to the health check plugin. You can read more about these announcements here. VMware has…
With the announcements just made at VMworld 2015, the embargo on Virtual SAN 6.1 has now been lifted, so we can now discuss publicly some of the new features and functionality. Virtual SAN is VMware’s software-defined solution for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). For the last number of months, I’ve been heavily involved in preparing for the Virtual SAN 6.1 launch. What follows is a brief description of what I find to be the most interesting and exciting of the upcoming features in Virtual SAN 6.1. Later on, I will follow-up with more in-depth blog posts on the new features and functionality.
Just in time for VMworld 2015, the guys over at Nexenta have given me a heads up on a new promotion that they are doing for Virtual SAN (VSAN) customers. Nexenta are giving away complimentary licenses for their NexentaStor product, which will allow Virtual SAN customers to do file services on top of VSAN.
Today sees the release of the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Storage Devices (MPSD) version 6.0.2. This is exciting for me as it means that vROps now has management and monitoring features for Virtual SAN 6.0. The management pack comes with a set of default dashboards for Virtual SAN clusters, as well as the ability to monitor and create proactive alerts/notifications based on VSAN events. I took the vROps Management Pack for a spin a little while back, and used it on my own lab cluster. Included below are a few of the features that it has.
I’ve been involved in a few conversations recently regarding how VSAN trace files are handled when the ESXi host that is participating in a VSAN cluster boots from a flash device. I already did a post about some of these considerations in the past, but focused mostly on USB/SD. However SATADOM was not included in this discussion, as we did not initially support SATADOM in VSAN 5.5, and only announced SATADOM support for VSAN 6.0. It seems that there are some different behaviors that need to be taken into account between the various flash boot devices, which is why I…
A common question we receive when we meet with customers and talk about Virtual SAN is “whether or not VSAN is going to be able to run my particular workloads?” This is a great question to ask, as most customers are coming from a background of SAN or NAS storage arrays, fibre channel, FC switches, HBAs, CNAs, etc. Since VSAN is still relative new (18 months old at this point), being confident that this new product can successfully run existing virtual machines and applications is paramount. To that end, VMware has developed a number of tools that are simple to…
Announcing some important news for VSAN 6.0 users, especially those using the VSAN Health Check Plugin. If you are using the Virtual SAN Health Check Plugin version 6.0 (and if you use Virtual SAN 6.0, you definitely should be using it), there is a new patch now available. Note that this new Health Check plugin version 6.0.1 release only requires the vCenter server to be updated. There are no new ESXi host side VIBs required. The patch comes as a new installable RPM for the vCenter appliance and a new MSI for Windows versions of vCenter server. [Update] For the…