vSphere 6.5 saw the release of a number of improvements in the areas of DRS. I won’t detail all of the improvements here, since my colleague Brian Graf has done a great job of describing the features in a number of different blog posts. He discussed Network-Aware DRS here, Predictive DRS here and Proactive HA here. Instead, what I wanted to talk about in this post is how these features inter-operate with vSAN, if they do at all. I’ve been asked this question a few times now, so after reaching out to Brian and a number of resources on this…
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…
This is day #2 of DockerCon 2017. If you want to read my impressions of DockerCon 2017 Day #1, you can find it here. Today, as well as attending the keynote, some breakout sessions and visiting the expo, I wanted to highlight a couple of VMware announcements that were made in this space yesterday. First of all, we announce the release of vSphere Integrated Containers v1.1. The big-ticket item in VIC 1.1 is that the key items of VIC Engine are now merged into a single OVA appliance for ease of deployment. As well as that, we also released Photon…
This is my very first DockerCon. It is also the first time that I’ve attended a conference purely as an attendee, and not have some responsibilities around breakout sessions, or customer meetings. Obviously I have an interest in much of the infrastructure side of things, so that is where I focused. This post is just some random musings about my first day at DockerCon17, and some things that I found interesting. I hope you do too.
Last week, I had a chance to catch up with my pal, Rawlinson Rivera. Rawlinson and I worked closely on a lot of storage related stuff at VMware, but he has since moved on to pastures new, and is currently the CTO for the Global Field over at Cohesity. I’ve written about Cohesity a number of times on this blog. I think the first time I wrote about them was during VMworld 2015, just before the 1.0 product launched, and they were still pitching the idea of secondary storage and how they would take care of things like snaps, clones,…
I was looking at the layout of RAID-5 object configuration the other day, and while these objects were deployed on vSAN with 4 components, something caught my eye. It wasn’t the fact that there were 4 components, which is what one would expect since we implement RAID-5 as a 3+1, i.e. 3 data segments and 1 parity segment. No, what caught my eye was that one of the components had a different vote count. Now, RAID-5 and RAID-6 erasure coding configurations are not the same as RAID-1. With RAID-1, we deploy multiple copies of the data depending on how many…
Sorry about the wordy title but this is a question that has come up a number of times. The request is that when I have two data sites and deploy two stretched clusters across these data sites, can the other stretched cluster support the witness appliance for this stretched cluster, and vice-versa? The answer is no, and I will explain why in this post.