A couple of months back, I wrote a short article on Rubrik. They were just coming out of stealth mode and had started an early access program. Since they had not officially launched, there wasn’t a lot that I was allowed to say about the company, other than give a high level overview. As they have now officially launched their r300 series of products, along with news of a massive $41 million Series B of funding, I can now share some additional details about their products and technology. Just to recap on what Rubrik do, they are offering a converged…
I had a query recently about changes to vSphere 6.0, especially when it comes to vSphere HA and Component Protection (VMCP) with vMSC, vSphere Metro Storage Cluster. The question is very straight forward – do all the same advanced setting recommendations for PDL and APD apply to vMSC on vSphere 6.0 as they did for vSphere 5.5? Or do we have some new recommendations now around PDL and APD for vMSC with the introduction of VMCP in vSphere 6.0?
With the release of VSAN 6.0, and the new all-flash configuration (AF-VSAN), I have received a number of queries around our 10% cache recommendation. The main query is, since AF-VSAN no longer requires a read cache, can we get away with a smaller write cache/buffer size? Before getting into the cache sizing, it is probably worth beginning this post with an explanation about the caching algorithm changes between version 5.5 and 6.0. In VSAN 5.5, which came as a hybrid configuration only with a mixture of flash and spinning disk, cache behaved as both a write buffer (30%) and read…
A few weeks, my good pal Cody Hosterman over at Pure Storage was experimenting with VAAI and discovered that he could successfully UNMAP blocks (reclaim) directly from a Guest OS in vSphere 6.0. VAAI are the vSphere APIs for Array Integration. Cody wrote about his findings here. Effectively, if you have deleted files within a Guest OS, and your VM is thinly provisioned, you can tell the array through this VAAI primitive that you are no longer using these blocks. This allows the array to reclaim them for other uses. I know a lot of you have been waiting for…
Today VMware announces the Virtual SAN 6.0 Health Check Plugin, a feature that will check your Virtual SAN configuration, both proactively and re-actively, and highlight any abnormal conditions found in the cluster. This is available to all our VSAN customers right now. Not only does it check the health of the cluster, but it also checks the state of the network, host connectivity, physical disk status, and underlying virtual machine object state. This is a great tool for ensuring that an initial deployment of VSAN or proof-of-concept has been rolled out successful, giving you confidence in your VSAN deployment. It…
The more astute of you who have already moved to vSphere 6.0, and like looking at CLI outputs, may have observed some new columns/fields in the PSA claimrules when you run the following command: # esxcli storage core claimrule list –claimrule-class=VAAI The new fields are as follows (slide right to view full output): XCOPY Use Array XCOPY Use XCOPY Max Reported Values Multiple Segments Transfer Size ————— —————– ————– false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false …
I had a few queries recently on how Virtual Volumes (VVols) worked with vSphere HA. In particular, I had a number of questions around whether or not VVol datastores could be used as a heartbeat datastore by vSphere HA. The answer is yes, the VVol datastore can be used for vSphere HA datastore heartbeating. If you want to see how, please read on. I think these queries may have arisen due to the fact that we do not use datastore heartbeating with Virtual SAN (VSAN). Just by way of reminder, the master host in a vSphere HA cluster uses a…