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…
Maxta are another storage vendor that I managed to get talking to at this years’ VMworld conference in San Francisco. Although they were present at last year’s VMworld, they only announced themselves in earnest last November (11/12/13) with the release of the Maxta Storage Platform (MxSP). I spent some time with Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, Director of PM & PMM at Maxta, and he was very open in sharing details on the Maxta product. If you read the blurb on Maxta on the VMworld sponsor/exhibitor list, it states that they eliminate the need for storage arrays, provide enterprise class data services and…
I’m sure Frank Denneman will need no introduction to many of you reading this article. Frank & I both worked in the technical marketing organization at VMware, before Frank moved on to PernixData last year and I moved to Integration Engineering here at VMware. PernixData FVP 1.0 released last year, and I did a short post on them here. I’d seen a number of people discussing new FVP features in the community, especially after PernixData’s co-founder Satyam’s presentation at Tech Field Day 5 (#TFD5). I decided to reach out to Frank, and see if he could spare some time to…
A number of new enhancements around Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) have been introduced in vSphere 5.5. I wanted to cover those in this post as I know many of you continue to use MSCS for service availability in your vSphere environments.
In this next post, I will examine some failure scenarios. I will concentrate of ESXi host failures, but suffice to say that a disk or network failure can also have consequences for virtual machines running on VSAN. There are two host failure scenarios highlighted below which can impact a virtual machine running on VSAN: An ESXi host, on which the VM is not running but has some of its storage objects, suffers a failure An ESXi host, on which the VM is running, suffers a failure Let’s look at these failures in more detail.