I have been receiving a number of queries lately with regards to First Class Disks (FCD) on vSphere, also referred to as Improved Virtual Disks (IVD). Some time back, I wrote a primer on FCDs and more recently I wrote about Safekeeper, a tool for interacting with FCDs which is available on GitHub as OpenSource. This may be why there has been an increase in awareness and I am seeing more questions about FCDs. In this post, I want to address some of the most common FCD/IVD questions that I have received to date. Feel free to leave comments if…
After returning from the holidays, one of the items at the top of my agenda was to become more familiar with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). For those of you who are not familiar with VCF, it is basically the ‘easy button’ for deploying the full vSphere stack of products, including virtual storage (vSAN), virtual networking (NSX) as well as monitoring and logging products such as vRealize Operation, vRealize Log Insight and so on. However, it is so much more, because once VCF is stood up, it becomes the building block for the deployment of what could be termed the application…
I’ve been looking at ways in which we could query the mappings of objects between the Kubernetes layer and the vSphere layer. One thing that I really wanted to figure out is if I have the VolumeHandle from the Persistent Volume in Kubernetes, could I easily find the datastore and path using PowerCLI. It looks like I can. Let’s begin with a look at the Persistent Volume or PV for short. Note that this is a Kubernetes cluster that is using the new vSphere CSI driver.
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…
I put together a few short (7 – 8 minute) videos to show off some new functionality that we’ve recently added in vSphere 6.7U3, as well as our new Velero v1.1 in action. The first video is on CNS, the VMware Cloud Native Storage feature which we included in vSphere 6.7U3. This demonstration involves the deployment of a Cassandra database on Kubernetes, which incidentally uses the new CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver for persistent volumes. Once the application is deployed, we can see the characteristics of the volumes bubbled up in vSphere. We also see how using CNS, we can…
At VMworld 2018, Pat Gelsinger made reference to a project that was looking to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create self driving operations for the vSphere stack. At VMworld 2019 last week, we were given a tech preview of the first iteration of this effort, called Project Magna. There were a number of VMworld break-out sessions dedicated to this effort, and I will reference them near the end of this post. However, this first tech preview is focused solely on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), namely vSAN. It is an interesting choice to start with, since we position vSAN as…
With all the buzz at VMworld 2019 this week, I thought I would highlight some of the cool new features that have been introduced with vSAN 6.7U3. In this release, there are 3 areas of focus, namely Unified Management, Intelligent Operations and Enhanced Performance and Availability. Let’s take a closer look at each of these. Unified Management Cloud Native Storage The primary initiative to providing unified management is our Cloud Native Storage feature. I’ve already blogged about CNS in a previous post. This is basically giving our vSAN Administrators the ability to gain insight into both virtual machine storage as…