Many of you will be aware of the new core storage features that were introduced in vSphere 6.5. If not, you can learn about them in this recently published white paper. Without doubt, the feature that has created the most amount of interest is automated unmap (finally, I hear you say!). Now a few readers have asked about the following comment in the automated unmap section. Automatic UNMAP is not supported on arrays with UNMAP granularity greater than 1MB. Auto UNMAP feature support is footnoted in the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide (HCL). So where do you find this info in…
I’m delighted to announce the availability of a new vSphere 6.5 core storage white paper. The paper covers new features such as VMFS-6 enhancements, policy driven Storage I/O Control, policy driven VM Encryption, NFS and iSCSI improvements and of course new limit increases in vSphere 6.5. There are too many VMware folks to thank for putting this paper together, but you’ll find them all listed in the acknowledgements section. I do want to mention one person however; a very special thanks to Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage who spent a lot of time testing many of these new features, and…
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 been liaising with one of our customers in the UK who is currently evaluating vSphere Integrated Containers in a very large vSphere infrastructure. In this infrastructure, a single vCenter Server is managing lots and lots of vSphere clusters, and very many distributed switches (DVS) and distributed portgroup. There were some issues encountered when trying to select the correct compute resource and correct distributed portgroup for a particular Virtual Container Host, which I will highlight in this post.
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…
As I prep myself for some upcoming VMUGs in EMEA, I realized that I hadn’t made any mention on a new product that we recently introduced in the CNA (Cloud Native Apps) space called Admiral. In a nutshell, Admiral is a Container Management platform for deploying and managing container based applications, intended to provide automated deployment and life cycle management of containers. Now, while Admiral can be used to deploy container directly to virtual machines that are running docker (e.g. Photon OS), it can also be used with vSphere Integrated Containers, and you can deploy containers via the VCH (Virtual…
I know that there will be a lot of information coming your way from various sources on this exact topic. Obviously, I would urge you to check out the latest and greatest documentation from our technical marketing guys for deeper detail and “how-to” guides. However, I did want to provide a brief overview of what new VSAN features are available in vSphere 6.5. Note that we also refer to this version of VSAN as 6.5.