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…
This is something very interesting which gained support with the release of vSAN 6.5. It will be of interest to those customers who boot their ESXi hosts from USB/SD devices, and also have vSAN configured. One long-standing restriction with this configuration was the inability to boot from USB/SD when the amount of memory in the host is over 512GB. This is because we could not guarantee that the memory dump would fit in the pre-sized core dump partition. Well, now we have the ability to resize the core dump partition, even when it resides on a USB/SD device. The guidance…
Many readers will be aware that John Nicholson and Pete Fletcha of the VMware Storage and Availability Tech Marketing team run a weekly podcast show called Virtually Speaking. This week I am back as a guest on their show, alongside Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage. We discuss a lot of the new core storage features in vSphere 6.5, which were detailed in a co-produced white paper that we recently created. You can read about how to get the white paper here. You can listen to the podcast through the player below. I hope you enjoy it.
Regular readers will know about vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC for short), as I have written a number of articles around my experiences with this new VMware product. Although announced with vSphere 6.5, VIC did not GA at the same time. However, VIC v0.8 is now generally available for vSphere 6.5.
Thanks to my friends over at VMUG Italia, my recorded presentation on Storage Challenges with Cloud Native Apps is now available. This was delivered at the VMUG UserCon event held in Milan, Italy, and which took place on November 15th. In this session I go through various container related projects that are underway at VMware (docker volume driver, vSphere Integrated Containers, Admiral, Harbor and Photon Platform), as well as how we are providing persistent storage for containers deployed on these products. Hope you enjoy it.
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…