VSAN 6.2 Part 4 – IOPS limit for object

VSAN 6.2 has a new quality of service mechanism which we are referring to as “IOPS limit for object”. Through a policy setting, a customer can set an IOPS limit on a per object basis (typically VMDK) which will guarantee that the object will not be able to exceed this amount of IOPS. This is very useful if you have a virtual machine that might be consuming more than its fair share of resources. This policy setting will ensure that there are “guard rails” placed on this virtual machine so it doesn’t impact other VMs, or impact the overall performance…

VSAN 6.2 Part 3 – Software Checksum

This next part of the VSAN 6.2 series of posts focuses on an important feature which many customer have been requesting. VSAN 6.2 introduces another new feature, end-to-end software checksum, to help customers avoid data integrity issues arising due to problems on the underlying storage media. In VSAN 6.2, checksum is enabled by default, but may be enabled or disabled on per virtual machine/object basis via VM storage policies. Checksum is enabled by default as we feel customers will always want to leverage this great new feature. The only reason one might disable it is if the application already has…

VSAN 6.2 Part 2 – RAID-5 and RAID-6 configurations

Those of you familiar with VSAN will be aware that when it comes to virtual machine deployments, historically, objects on the VSAN datastore were deployed either as a RAID-0 (stripe) or a RAID-1 (mirror) or a combination of both. From a capacity perspective, this was quite an overhead. For instance, if I wanted my VM to tolerate 1 failure, I need two copies of the data. If I wanted my VM to tolerate 2 failures, I needed three copies of the data and if I wanted my VM to tolerate the maximum number of failures, which is 3, then I…

VSAN 6.2 Part 1 – Deduplication and Compression

Now that VSAN 6.2 is officially launched, it is time to start discussing some of the new features that we have introduced into our latest version of Virtual SAN. Possibly one of the most eagerly anticipated feature is the introduction of deduplication and compression, two space efficiency techniques that will reduce the overall storage consumption of the applications running in virtual machines on Virtual SAN. Of course, this also lowers the economics of running an all-flash VSAN, and opens up all-flash VSAN to multiple use cases.

Cohesity Data Platform 2.0 is out

Cohesity have released their next version (2.0) of the Cohesity Data Platform. I met Cohesity at VMworld 2015, and  I wrote about my first impressions of the solution in a blog post from back in August 2015. In a nutshell, Cohesity are positioning their Data Platform as hyper-converged secondary storage. They want to stop the silo’ing of different storage for backups, file shares and analytics in the data center, and offer you a single platform for all of your secondary storage needs. Now they are ready with the next version, so lets take a quick look at what is coming…

An overview of the new Virtual SAN 6.2 features

If you were wondering why my blogging has dropped off in recent months, wonder no more. I’ve been fully immersed in the next release of VSAN. Today VMware has just announced the launch of VSAN 6.2, the next version of VMware’s Virtual SAN product. It is almost 2.5 years since we launched the VSAN beta at VMworld 2013, and almost 2 years to the day since we officially GA’ed our first release of VSAN way back in March 2014. A lot has happened since then, with 3 distinct releases in that 2 year period (6.0, 6.1 and now 6.2). For…

Upcoming speaker session at the Singapore VMUG Usercon

I’m delighted to say that I have been invited to present at the next Singapore VMUG Usercon, which will take place in the Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel on Tuesday, March 1st, 2016. I will be using the opportunity to present on Virtual SAN (VSAN) and will be sharing lots of news and information about the upcoming features that we have planned. It would seem that I am one of the first speakers of the day, so I will have a lot of free time later in the morning and in the afternoon if anyone would like to talk about VMware,…