I was doing some work in the lab with Storage Policy Based Management recently. I was using both vSAN and a Virtual Volume array from Nimble Storage. While I was able to create independent policies for both vSAN and VVols, I was curious to see if I could create a policy where I could be offered both datastore types for the initial placement of a VM. For example, if I wanted to ensure my VM was encrypted, could I have a policy which would be compliant with both vSAN datastore and the Virtual Volume datastore, so long as they both…
I’m delighted to report that I’ve been invited to speak at the upcoming Norway VMUG (VMware User Group) meetings. These take place in three different cities over the week of May 29th (week 22), with three meetings in three days. On Tuesday, May 30th, the Oslo VMUG will take place. On May 31st, it’s the turn of the Trondheim VMUG and we will finish with the Bergen VMUG on June 1st. I am going to broaden the scope of the conversation at these VMUGs, and talk about Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) in general. Of course, we will look at…
Last week during a visit to VMware headquarters in Palo Alto, I had the opportunity to catch up with our engineering team who are responsible for developing storage solutions for Docker and Kubernetes running on vSphere. I have written about our Docker volume driver for vSphere and Kubernetes on vSphere already, but it’s been a while since I caught up with the team, and obviously more and more enhancements are being added all the time. I thought it might be useful to share the improvements with you here. There also seems to be some concerns raised about the availability of…
The first email I saw this morning in my inbox was from my good pal, Alan Renouf. Alan is our product line manager for APIs, SDKs, CLIs and Automation Frameworks (congrats on the promotion Alan). Anyway, Alan was announcing the General Availability of VMware vSphere PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1. There are a whole bunch of improvements in this release, and much kudos must go to the PowerCLI team. However from a vSAN perspective, things look really cool. [Update] This version of PowerCLI also works with vSAN 6.2 and 6.0, so there is no need for customers to upgrade to vSAN…
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to meet with a number of VMware customers in both Singapore and in the UAE. Most of the sessions were enablement and education type sessions, where there was a lot of white-boarding of VSAN (VMware’s hyper-converged infrastructure product) and Virtual Volumes (VVols – Software Defined Storage or SDS for the storage arrays). This wasn’t a sales session; I’m not in sales. The objective of these sessions was simply to educate. I guess when you are immersed in this stuff 24×7, it easy to fall into the trap of believing that everyone is well…
With the release of vSphere 6.0 earlier this year, VMware introduced the eagerly anticipated VVols or Virtual Volumes. As we see more and more traction around VVols, a specific question has come up a number of times already. The question is basically: “What happens to VVols if I lose my VASA Provider or my vCenter Server, or indeed both of these components? Will I still have access to my devices?”.
Primary Data were one of the storage vendors that I wanted to catch up with at VMworld 2015. I was fortunate enough to meet with Graham Smith who is their Director of Virtualization Product Management. Graham gave me a demonstration of the Primary Data product in the Solutions Exchange at VMworld, and I also had an opportunity to visit their offices in Los Altos during a recent trip to the bay area and catch up once again with Graham and Kaycee Lai, SVP of Product Management & Sales at Primary Data. Before we get into the product and solution details, I…