Regular readers will be aware that I “dabble” from time to time in the world of Cloud Native Apps. For me, a lot of this dabbling is trying to figure out how I can go about providing persistent storage to container based applications. Typically this in the shape of container volumes that are carved out of the underlying storage infrastructure, whether that is VMFS, NFS, vSAN or even Virtual Volumes. VMware Project Hatchway has enabled me to do this on multiple occasions. Project Hatchway was officially announced at VMworld 2017, but I’ve been working with this team since the early…
I was discussing the following situation with some of our field staff today. We are aware that snapshots inherit the same policies as the base VMDK, so if I deployed a VM as a RAID-6, RAID-5, or a RAID-1, snapshots inherit the same configuration. However if I have a host failure in a 6-node vSAN running RAID-6 VMs, or a failure in a 4-node vSAN running RAID-5, or a 3-node vSAN running RAID-1, and I try to take a snapshot, then vSAN does not allow me to take the snapshot as there are not enough hosts in the cluster to…
After last week’s post of Minio running on top of vSAN to provide an S3 object store, a number of folks said that I should also check out Scality S3 server. After a bit of research, it seems that Scality S3 server is akin to the CloudServer from Zenko.io. I “think” Zenko CloudServer is an umbrella for a few different projects, one of which is the S3server. In fact, clicking on the GitHub link on the Zenko.io CloudServer page takes me to the Scality/S3 page. Anyway, let’s look at how to set this up. I’m not going to repeat all…
While we are always looking at what other data services vSAN could provide natively, at the present moment, there is no native way to host S3 compatible storage on vSAN. After seeing the question about creating an S3 object store on vSAN raised a few times now, I looked into what it would take to have an S3 compatible store running on vSAN. A possible solution, namely Minio, was brought to my attention. While this is by no means an endorsement of Minio, I will admit that it was comparatively easy to get it deployed. Since the Minio Object Store…
This post came about after a brief discussion with my pal, Lee Dilworth. Although the outcome of this test has really nothing to do with vSAN, the behaviour was observed on certain Guest OS which were running on vSAN. I guess the first thing that needs to be made clear is that there is no support for in-guest UNMAP (or TRIM) for VMs running on vSAN at this time, although it is something we are examining very closely. So with this in mind, we had feedback to say that a test being run as part of a proof-of-concept was showing…
My Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) presentation slide deck is now available online. This is the presentation that I delivered at a number of VMUG (VMware User Group) meetings this year in Europe, primarily Norway and Poland. SPBM is an integral part of VMware’s software defined storage vision, and is deeply integrated into vSAN, Virtual Volumes (VVols) and VAIO, the vSphere APIs for I/O Filters. Hope you find it useful. 2017 VMUG Storage Policy Based Management from Cormac Hogan
It seems that 2-node vSAN for ROBO (remote office/branch office) deployments are becoming more and more popular. The fact that one can now connect the 2 vSAN hosts at the remote office directly back-to-back without needing a 10Gb switch has reduced the cost extensively. And with the introduction of a vSAN Enterprise for ROBO license edition with vSAN 6.6.1, you get the full feature set of vSAN on 2-node deployments. This new edition builds on the vSAN Advanced edition, and enables the use of features like native encryption and stretched clusters on a per-VM pricing model for smaller sites. The…