At this year’s VMworld, I was very fortunate to have 3 of my submitted sessions accepted for both VMworld in Las Vegas and again for VMworld in Barcelona. Not only that, but I got the opportunity to present with my friends and colleagues, Christos, Duncan and Paudie. The sessions that I presented in both Las Vegas and Barcelona were as follows: HCI1246BE – Optimizing vSAN for Performance with Paudie O’Riordan HCI1270BE – The Power of Storage Policy-Based Management with Duncan Epping HCI1338BE – vSAN: An Ideal Storage Platform for Kubernetes-controlled Cloud-Native Apps with Christos Karamanolis These have now been re-recorded…
vSAN readers will most likely be aware that we introduced support for iSCSI on vSAN way back in vSAN 6.5. That is to say, we had the ability to create iSCSI targets and LUNs using vSAN objects, and present the LUNs to external iSCSI initiators. That release also supported Persistent Group Reservations (PGRs) but it did lack transparent failover. We followed this up with an enhancement in vSAN 6.7 which enabled transparent failover. This enabled support for features like Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) to work on iSCSI on vSAN, if using shared disk mode as it uses reservations on…
I’m back in the lab this week, looking at some of the newer features around vSAN. As part of this, I needed vSAN Encryption enabled, so I downloaded the latest HyTrust KeyControl appliance as this has an easy to use KMIP Server. This new version is 4.2.1, and it has a few new steps compared to the previous versions I used, which were a little confusing to begin with. First I deployed the OVA, supplied the password, logged into the web interface, and enabled KMIP as before. However, that is where things are now a little different to before.
I was delighted to be asked along to the latest Virtually Speaking podcast last week. I was invited to attend alongside the very smart Frank Denneman. Also joining us was Myles “vOdgeball sports scholarship” Gray (you’ll need to listen to the podcast to get that joke). And of course, we were joined by talented podcast hosts, Pete and John. Pete was in top form after his 1 month vac^H^H^H working in Italy (touché my friend :-D) The podcast was really a conversation about why vSphere and vSAN are ideal platforms for next-gen apps and containerized application, particularly when they are…
This question has come up a number of times in the past. However, there have been some updates that I personally was not aware of until last week. To cut to the chase, Horizon View 7 (all clone types) is supported with vSAN stretch cluster. This is good news. However, it is very important that customers should follow the Horizon View Reference Architecture (RA) design document and test the scalability of Horizon 7 and vSAN Stretched Clusters in their environment.
Some time ago, I hooked our Virtual Volume (VVol) capable storage array up to a vSphere 6.5 cluster. I did a few preliminary tests, such as adding the VASA (vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness) Provider, creating the VVol datastore, observing the creation of the Protocol Endpoints (PEs), and of course creating some virtual machines as a set of VVols. All went flawlessly. Then, like many other lab tests, I got distracted by a number of other things. In the meantime, the storage array vendor announced support for an updated VASA version, and we had the storage array updated to accommodate…
Recently I was looking for a way to consume the Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) cmdlets in PowerCLI. I wanted to see if I could provision a VM from a Template onto my vSAN datastore with a particular policy rather than simply change it after it was deployed. It wasn’t as easy as I thought, as some of the commands I tried would only change the VM Home Namespace to the new policy, and leave the disks with the default datastore policy. And when I tried to clone a new VM from a template, I couldn’t get the VM to…