Earlier this month, I shared a post about my experiences with deploying VIO, VMware integrated OpenStack. One of the issues I highlighted was the fact that when I tried to create a network, it failed with a very unhelpful error message. The reason the network creation failed was due to a limitation with using a distributed switch (VDS). Instead I had to create what was known as a “provider network”, which is a special step needed for VDS networking. I am in the midst of an OpenStack training, and I’m trying to relate what I am learning on the training…
I hadn’t realized that we had now begun to use the LVM (Logical Volume Manager) in our vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) version 6.0. Of course, I found out the hard way after a network outage in our lab brought down our VCSA which was running on NFS. On reboot, the VCSA complained about file system integrity as follows:
I had a query recently from a partner who was deploying VMware Horizon View 6.1 on top of an all-flash VSAN 6.0. They had done all the due diligence with configuring the AF-VSAN appropriately, marking certain flash devices as capacity devices, and so on. The configuration looked something like this: The they went ahead and deployed Horizon View 6.1, which they had done many times before on hybrid configurations. They were able to successfully deploy full clone pools on the AF-VSAN, but hit a strange issue when deploying linked clone pools (floating/dedicated). The clone virtual machine operation would fail with…
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…