Well, I’m delighted to have been invited to present at quite a few VMUGs recently, so I thought I’d share the details of them with you here. I’ve been working on my presentation which is called “What is happening in the world of VMware Storage?”. In fact, there is a lot going on, not just in the world of vSAN and VVols, but also in core storage as well as in cloud native storage. So in my 1 hour slot, I’ll be trying to update you on all of this goodness. No easy task, but I’m always up for a…
Hot on the heels on Pure Storage’s recent announcement on Virtual Volume (VVol) support, I wanted to take a closer look at their VVol implementation for myself. Thanks to the support team over at Pure, they were able to very quickly update our lab array to the latest release that has support for VVols. Once this upgrade was complete (which was all done remotely), I wanted to go ahead and register the VASA provider with my vCenter server. You can read more about the role of VASA here. I wanted to step through the process manually, rather than use the…
There was lots of big news yesterday from our friends over at Pure Storage. First of all, we had an announcement about their Virtual Volume (VVol) implementation going GA. This is very exciting for me, and I look forward to testing it out in our lab. The implementation is a VASA 3.0 implementation, which means support for array based replication (ABR). My good pal Pete Fletcha did a great write-up on the announcement here. And of course, Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage also gives us his low-down on what this VVol implementation means to him. One thing is for sure,…
A short post today to let you know about a new VMware training class that I helped to create. This new class is called VMware vSAN Production Operations, and is a new 3 day class delivered by our Education Services division. As you can imagine from the title, this class is geared towards administrators who are responsible for managing vSAN on a daily basis in a production environment. The class focuses primarily on operational considerations such as storage policy change impacts, hardware monitoring and replacement, scaling up and scaling out the cluster, data services (e.g. encryption), maintenance mode considerations and…
Regular readers will have noticed that I have been doing a bit of work recently with docker swarm, and what you need to do to get it to work on VMs running on vSphere. The reason why I had taken such an interest is because I wanted to look at a new product that our Project Hatchway team have been cooking up, namely vFile. In a nutshell, vFile provides simultaneous, persistent volume access between nodes in the same Docker Swarm cluster. In some ways, it can be thought of as an extension to vDVS, the vSphere Docker Volume Service (from…
I got a chance to revisit my docker swarm deployment this week after a bit of a break. I was a little curious about my setup because when I spoke to some of our ‘Project Hatchway‘ engineers, I was told that I should be able to launch a single instance of Nginx in Docker Swarm (“docker service create –replicas 1 -p 8080:80 –name web nginx”) and I should be able to access the web service using the following command from any swarm node – “curl 127.0.0.1:8080”. This was not what I was seeing. When I launched the Nginx service, the…
After highlighting how easy it is to run docker swarm in Photon OS, I had a follow on question on how easy it would be to test the functionality. Just to recap, the only additional step you need to get Docker Swarm running on Photon OS was to open port 2377 on the master node. After that, you simply initialize the master, and all the other nodes/VMs are added as swarm workers. You might be wondering if you need to do a bunch of other stuff in iptables for docker, but the answer is no (for this relatively simple test…