I had an interesting question the other day about whether Raw Device Mappings (aka RDMs) still had a reliance on the LUN ID, especially when it comes to the vMotion of Virtual Machines which have RDMs attached. I remember some time back that we introduced a concept called Dynamic Name Resolution for RDMs, which meant that we no longer relied on a consistent HBA number or even the path to identify the RDM, but do we still use the LUN ID in vSphere 5.1?
A quick kudos to my colleague William Lam (@lamw) for bringing this to my attention. There is an issue in the new vSphere 5.1 web client when it comes to displaying Fibre Channel World Wide Node Names (WWNN) and World Wide Port Names (WWPN). The WWNN & WWPN are unique identifiers used in the Fibre Channel world. The problem is that the WWPN & WWNN are not rendered correctly in the UI. It is easier to show you an example. Here is a screen shot taken from my own 5.1 environment. Note the WWNN & WWPN – the identifier displayed…
Another Flash Array vendor that I wanted to meet with at this years VMworld in San Francisco was Violin Memory. For those of you who have been following the keynotes at VMworld 2012, one of the things which will have stood out will have been the 1 million IOPs from a single VM. Now 1 million IOPs isn’t something new. Last year, VMware’s performance team published a paper on how they achieved 1 million IOPs from a single vSphere 5.0 host running six virtual machines. But this year, we achieved 1 million IOPs from a single Virtual Machine. And guess…
During VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up once again with the team from Tintri. My first introduction to Tintri was at last year’s VMworld, where they received runner-up in the ‘Hardware for Virtualization’ category by TechTarget for best of VMworld 2011. Well this year they went one better, and won the Best of VMworld 2012 Gold award in Hardware for Virtualization. And for good reason. Let’s see the enhancements to the Tintri platform over the last 12 months have brought.
Pure Storage are an all-flash enterprise storage company. I first met these guys at VMworld 2011 and was quite impressed by their product. Like many Flash Array vendors at the time, there wasn’t a great amount of vSphere integration features. However, with this latest release of Purity v2.5, Pure Storage are addressing this and more. I had a chance to meet and discuss these new features with Matt Kixmoeller & Ravi Venkat of Pure Storage recently. Not only are they now VMware-Ready certified, but they’ve got a whole bunch of integration features. Let’s have a look at the features that…
This is not really a storage feature per-se, but I am including it in this series of vSphere 5.1 storage enhancements simply because most of the work to support this 5 node Microsoft cluster framework was done in the storage layer.
This post will look at Storage DRS enhancements in vSphere 5.1.