This is something which comes up a lot. In the past, many people used a by-product of the Storage vMotion operation to rename all of the files associated with a virtual machine. In this vSphere 5.1U1 post, I mentioned that we brought back this functionality but you had to set an advanced parameter to make it work. Well, in vSphere 5.5, it works without the advanced option. The following blog post shows you this rename of virtual machine files using Storage vMotion in vSphere 5.5 to rename all of the files associated with a virtual machine.
I wrote about this issue on the vSphere blog some time back. Essentially, the issue described in that post was if a VM that was being replicated via vSphere Replication was migrated to another datastore, it triggered a full resync because the persistent state files (psf) which tracks the changes were deleted. All of the disks contents are then reread and check-summed on each side. This can have a significant impact on vSphere Replication’s RPO (Recovery Point Objective).
Continuing on the series of vSphere 5.5 Storage Enhancements, we now come to a feature that is close to many people’s hearts. The vSphere Storage API for Array Integration (VAAI) UNMAP primitive reclaims dead or stranded space on a thinly provisioned VMFS volume, something that we could not do before this primitive came into existence. However, it has a long and somewhat checkered history. Let me share the timeline with you before I get into what improvements we made in vSphere 5.5.
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.
There have been some notable discussions about VMFS heap size and heap consumption over the past year or so. An issue with previous versions of VMFS heap meant that there were concerns when accessing above 30TB of open files from a single ESXi host. VMware released a number of patches to temporarily work around the issue. ESXi 5.0p5 & 5.1U1 introduced a larger heap size to deal with this. However, I’m glad to say that a permanent solution has been included in vSphere 5.5 in the form of dedicated slab for VMFS pointers and a new eviction process. I will…
I am presenting at a number of upcoming VMware User Group (VMUG) conferences over the next month or so. I’ll be basically doing my pitch on Virtual SAN (VSAN) along with some demos on install and configuring. On November 21st, I’ll be presenting at the UK National VMUG (for the 3rd year in a row) at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull. More information about the UK National VMUG here, including registration. On December 3rd, I’ll be at the Nordic VMUG in Copenhagen, Denmark. This is being held at the Bella center, where VMworld was held before Barcelona. More information…
I’ve been presenting at a number of conferences over the past number of weeks/months, both internal and external. While a lot of my sessions have focused around Virtual SAN (VSAN), I got a number of questions around whether or not the new Software Defined Storage product from EMC, ViPR, competes with or complements Virtual SAN. Since ViPR 1.0 is now available (since September), and a new release of ViPR is due out before the end of the year, I thought I’d take a closer look at what ViPR is all about and try to answer that question.