Last week, I had the pleasure of catching up with a new startup called Runecast. These guys are doing something that is very close to my heart. As systems become more and more complex, and with fewer people taking on more responsibility, highlighting potential issues, and providing descriptive guidance to resolving an issue is now critical. This is something that is resonating in the world of HCI, hyper-converged infrastructure, where the vSphere administrator may also be the storage administrator, and perhaps the network administrator too. This is where Runecast come in. Using a myriad of resources such as VMware’s Knowledgebase…
Earlier this year, our colleagues in the US kicked off the “Getting More Out of vSAN” webcast series. We are pleased to be able to replicate this initiative in EMEA. We now have 2 webcast sessions lined up for the month of March: Session 1: vSAN Architecture & Tips and Tricks for 6.5, 14 March @ 10AM GMT This session provides an overview of vSAN’s architecture, policy based management and commonly used terms. We will also examine vSAN 2-node and stretched cluster configurations and some popular vSAN use cases. We will finish with an overview of new vSAN 6.5 features.…
ESXi 6.0 Update 3 is now available. This update is significant for vSAN customers as there are a number of performance related issues addressed. The KB article detailing vSAN performance improvements can be found here, and the ESXi 6.0 U3 release notes can be found here. I wouldn’t necessarily write a blog post to highlight a KB or update release, but I think the improvements that have been made to vSAN performance in this update are very significant. Improvements include enhancements to the way that we do logging. In vSAN, every I/O operation is logged before being processed. We have…
I already described how you can get started with Kubernetes natively on vSphere using the kube-up/kube-down mechanism. This was pretty straight-forward, but not ideal as it was not very reliable or easy to follow. Since writing that piece, Kubernetes have moved on to a new deployment mechanism called kubernetes-anywhere. In this post, I will show you how to deploy Kubernetes onto a vSphere environment with a vSAN datastore, using the kubernetes-anywhere utility. All of this is done from a Photon OS VM. Now in my previous example, I used the Photon OS OVA, which is a trimmed down version of…
Last week during a visit to VMware headquarters in Palo Alto, I had the opportunity to catch up with our engineering team who are responsible for developing storage solutions for Docker and Kubernetes running on vSphere. I have written about our Docker volume driver for vSphere and Kubernetes on vSphere already, but it’s been a while since I caught up with the team, and obviously more and more enhancements are being added all the time. I thought it might be useful to share the improvements with you here. There also seems to be some concerns raised about the availability of…
In a previous post related to multiple failures in a vSAN stretched cluster, we showed that if a failure caused the data components to be out of sync, the most recent copy of the data needs to recover before the object becomes accessible again. This is true even if there are a majority of objects available (e.g. old data copy and witness). This is to ensure that we do not recover the “STALE” copy of the data which might have out of date information. To briefly revisit the previous post, the accessibility of the object when there are multiple failures…
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…