I was delighted to be asked along to the latest Virtually Speaking podcast last week. I was invited to attend alongside the very smart Frank Denneman. Also joining us was Myles “vOdgeball sports scholarship” Gray (you’ll need to listen to the podcast to get that joke). And of course, we were joined by talented podcast hosts, Pete and John. Pete was in top form after his 1 month vac^H^H^H working in Italy (touché my friend :-D) The podcast was really a conversation about why vSphere and vSAN are ideal platforms for next-gen apps and containerized application, particularly when they are…
This question has come up a number of times in the past. However, there have been some updates that I personally was not aware of until last week. To cut to the chase, Horizon View 7 (all clone types) is supported with vSAN stretch cluster. This is good news. However, it is very important that customers should follow the Horizon View Reference Architecture (RA) design document and test the scalability of Horizon 7 and vSAN Stretched Clusters in their environment.
Some time ago, I hooked our Virtual Volume (VVol) capable storage array up to a vSphere 6.5 cluster. I did a few preliminary tests, such as adding the VASA (vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness) Provider, creating the VVol datastore, observing the creation of the Protocol Endpoints (PEs), and of course creating some virtual machines as a set of VVols. All went flawlessly. Then, like many other lab tests, I got distracted by a number of other things. In the meantime, the storage array vendor announced support for an updated VASA version, and we had the storage array updated to accommodate…
A short post today. There are two upcoming VMware User Group (VMUG) events to bring to your attention next month, both in the north of England. I’ve been asked to speak at both. The first is the North East England VMUG and this will take place in Newcastle on September 20th. The next is the North West England VMUG in Manchester on September 26th. At both sessions, I’ll be talking about what is happening in the world of VMware storage, so I’ll be covering vSAN, Virtual Volumes (VVols), IO Filters, Core Storage, as well as what we are doing in…
Recently I was looking for a way to consume the Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) cmdlets in PowerCLI. I wanted to see if I could provision a VM from a Template onto my vSAN datastore with a particular policy rather than simply change it after it was deployed. It wasn’t as easy as I thought, as some of the commands I tried would only change the VM Home Namespace to the new policy, and leave the disks with the default datastore policy. And when I tried to clone a new VM from a template, I couldn’t get the VM to…
I was with one of our large EMEA customers last week, and we talked quite a bit about the evolution of vSAN. This customer is already one of our larger vSAN customers with very many clusters, and many, many nodes. They have also been a great vSAN reference for us, having first deployed the initial vSAN 5.5 release. One point that hit home was that they found it was quite difficult to determine the various features and enhancements that were introduced in each vSAN release. They mentioned that having a quick reference would be useful as they could use it…
Yes, it’s that time of year again. VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas is taking place next month. Once again, as per previous years, I will be co-presenting on a few sessions. It will be no surprise that, once again, my sessions are focused on storage, hyper-convergence and predominantly vSAN. However, this year I will also be presenting with my CTO and VMware Fellow, Christos Karamanolis, for the very first time. Without further ado, let me go through my sessions in a bit more details, and if they look interesting to you, feel free to sign up. I also included a…