With the announcements just made at VMworld 2015, the embargo on Virtual SAN 6.1 has now been lifted, so we can now discuss publicly some of the new features and functionality. Virtual SAN is VMware’s software-defined solution for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). For the last number of months, I’ve been heavily involved in preparing for the Virtual SAN 6.1 launch. What follows is a brief description of what I find to be the most interesting and exciting of the upcoming features in Virtual SAN 6.1. Later on, I will follow-up with more in-depth blog posts on the new features and functionality.
Just in time for VMworld 2015, the guys over at Nexenta have given me a heads up on a new promotion that they are doing for Virtual SAN (VSAN) customers. Nexenta are giving away complimentary licenses for their NexentaStor product, which will allow Virtual SAN customers to do file services on top of VSAN.
I mentioned in an earlier post that Cohesity were one of the vendors that I wanted to check out at VMworld 2015. These guys have only literally exited stealth. Just yesterday, I sat in on a webinar from Nick Howell, who I know extremely well from his days in technical marketing over at NetApp. Nick has now joined Cohesity as the role of an evangelist, which I think is a great move on Cohesity’s part. On Nick’s webinar, he introduced us to the vision behind Cohesity’s product, what they hope to fix in a customer’s environment and some teasers regarding…
I had a heads-up recently on a new company, ClearSky Data, who only exited stealth today. I want to make it clear that I have not yet been briefed by the folks from ClearSky, but I am definitely hoping to chat with them at VMworld 2015 (they’ll be at booth 441). Therefore a lot of what I have in this post is conjecture on my behalf. It seems to me that their goal is to help change how enterprise IT teams buy, manage and optimize their storage. Instead of consuming traditional storage arrays (alongside backup and disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure)…
As usual, there have been loads of things happening over the last 12 months in the storage space. The Solutions Exchange at VMworld is always a great place to meet new storage startups, and get some further information on their respective products and innovations. This year, I’ve made a note of a few startups that I wish to catch up with at VMworld 2015 and find out what issues are they trying to address with their technology, and why should a customer choose their solution over some of the others in the storage space. Disclaimer: Please note that I am…
I already wrote an article on the NexentaConnect for VSAN product after seeing it in action at VMworld last year. More recently, I had the opportunity to play with it in earnest. Rather than giving you the whole low-down on NexentaConnect, instead I will use this post to show the steps involved in presenting a file share built by NexentaConnect to a VM. In this case, the VM and the file share both reside on Virtual SAN. I will also show you how to simply revert to a point-in-time snapshot of the file share using NexentaConnect. To answer the common…
I’ve had an opportunity recently to get some hands-on with HyTrust’s Data Control product to do some data encryption of virtual machine disks in my Virtual SAN 6.0 environment. I won’t deep dive into all of the “bells and whistle” details about HyTrust – my good buddy Rawlinson has already done a tremendous job detailing that in this blog post. Instead I am going to go through a step-by-step example of how to use HyTrust and show how it prevents your virtual machine disk from being snooped. In my case, I am encrypting virtual machine disks from VMs that are…