Last week I wrote about the new vSAN management pack for vRealize Operations. This week sees another nice new storage feature/solution released. This time it is a solution to integrate vRealize Automation and Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM). For those of you who saw the VMworld 2016 keynotes, you may remember Yanbing Li demonstrating the ability to have a VM move to a completely new datacenter, based on storage policy compliance. In essence, if a VM exits compliance with its storage policy (for whatever reason), vRealize Automation SPBM integration can initiate a migration of this VM to a completely different…
Last month we announced the release of a new vROps Management Pack specifically for vSAN. Previously the vSAN Management Pack was bundled with the MPSD – Management Pack for Storage Devices. I wrote about this when it entered beta, way back in 2015. Well, for those customers who are only interested in monitoring vSAN, and didn’t want all the other parts of the MPSD, the new vSAN Management Pack is now a stand-alone offering, so no MPSD required. This new vSAN Management Pack focuses on 3 main areas of vSAN: (1) Health and Availability, (2) Performance Analysis and (3) Capacity…
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…
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 of you will have seen the recent announcement for Photon Controller version 1.1. For me, the interesting part of this announcement is the support for vSAN as a storage platform with Photon Controller v1.1. I should think that the first question that those of you are familiar with both vSAN and Photon Controller will ask is “how do I configure vSAN for Photon Controller when there is no vCenter server in the mix?”. This is a very good question, and one which I will highlight in this blog post. There are also a few line items in the release…
The first email I saw this morning in my inbox was from my good pal, Alan Renouf. Alan is our product line manager for APIs, SDKs, CLIs and Automation Frameworks (congrats on the promotion Alan). Anyway, Alan was announcing the General Availability of VMware vSphere PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1. There are a whole bunch of improvements in this release, and much kudos must go to the PowerCLI team. However from a vSAN perspective, things look really cool. [Update] This version of PowerCLI also works with vSAN 6.2 and 6.0, so there is no need for customers to upgrade to vSAN…
I’ve talked a lot recently about the various VMware projects surrounding containers, container management, repositories, etc. However one of the most popular container cluster managers is Kubernetes (originally developed by Google). To use an official description, Kubernetes (or K8S for short) is a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts”. So this begs the question about how easy is it to deploy K8S on vSphere. I have already documented how K8S can be deployed on Photon Platform. But can you easily deploy Kubernetes on a vSphere infrastructure. The answer now is that it…