A holiday promo for the vSAN 6.7U1 Deep Dive Book

A very short post to let you know that Duncan and I are doing a holiday promotion for our vSAN 6.7U1 Deep Dive book. We will start the promotion for the e-book on December 24th, when we will lower the price of the e-book to just US $0.99 (Amazon.com) and UK £0.99 (Amazon.co.uk). The price will then gradually rise back to the original price over the following 10 days. Unfortunately, Amazon does not allow publishers to create promotions on every site, so this promotion will only be available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. For the paper copy of the book, we…

CNS – not just for vSAN

After a very eventful VMworld, we received lots of questions about CNS, the Cloud Native Storage feature that was released with vSphere 6.7U3. Whilst most of the demonstrations and blog articles around CNS focused on vSAN, what may have been missed is that this feature also works with both VMFS and NFS datastores. For that reason, I decided to create some examples of how CNS can also bubble up information in vSphere about Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PVs) created on both VMFS and NFS datastores. Let’s begin by creating some simple policies to tag my VMFS datastore and my NFS datastore.…

Safekeeping – a useful tool for interacting with First Class Disks/Improved Virtual Disks

I have been doing quite a bit of work on First Class Disks (FCD), also known as Improved Virtual Disks (IVD) over the past number of months. One tool that has been extremely useful in improving my understanding of FCDs has been safekeeping, a tool developed by Max Daneri of VMware and which is now available to download on GitHub. If you did not know, FCDs are used extensively in VMware’s new Cloud Native Storage (CNS) offering that is currently available with vSphere/vSAN 6.7U3. Now, whilst the primary aim of this tool is to help backup vendors become familiar with…

Video of HCI Spotlight Session from #VMworld now available #HCI3551KE

This week at VMworld in Barcelona, I was honored to  be able to  co-present the HCIBU Spotlight Session with our GM and SVP, John Gilmartin. I noticed that the full video is now available online on the VMworld Video site. If you want to learn more about how to Future Proof your Infrastructure with vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation, give it a watch. The cool demos, showing Cloud Native Storage, Site Recovery Manager support for vVols and Project Magna auto-tuning vSAN all start around the 30 minute mark. The full video is available here. Enjoy!

Recording of my VMUG France presentation now available

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at the French VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting in Paris. The local VMUG team did an awesome job with respect to the logistics, and even had someone on-site to record all of the sessions. The team just sent me the recording of my presentation, which I am delighted to be able to share with you. If you’re interested in learning more about vSAN 6.7U3, Kubernetes and Cloud Native Storage, this recording should help. And don’t worry – only the first few sentences are in my very terrible French 🙂 Encore merci équipe…

See you at VMworld 2019 (Barcelona)

Hola! It is only a month or so to go until VMworld 2019 arrives back in Europe. Yet again, we are back in Barcelona for what promises to be a great event. I missed VMworld in San Francisco this year – too many things happening on the home front. So I’m really looking forward to getting down to Spain in early November and meeting up with everyone again. I am involved in 2 sessions in Barcelona. One of the sessions is the HCIBU Spotlight Session, HCI3551KE. I am delivering this with our SVP and GM of the Hyper-converged Infrastructure Business…

vSAN 6.7 U3 New Advanced Options

Today’s blog post highlights two new Advanced Option in vSAN 6.7 U3. The first of these is Large Cluster Support. Today, in vSAN 6.7 U3, we are now able to configure support for large vSAN clusters (i.e. clusters that are over 32 nodes in size) with a single Advanced Option. In the past, you would have needed to go to each host in the cluster and make various advanced setting changes on a host by host basis such as TcpipHeapMax. Being able to set a single cluster wide Advanced Option does simplify things very much. Below is a screenshot taken…