VSAN 6.next beta – A glimpse of the future

Before Virtual SAN was generally available last year, the preceding VSAN beta program was one of the largest beta programs ever to take place at VMware. Today, a new beta program for VSAN was announced for 2015! This week, we’ve already announced a bunch of enhancements in VSAN 6.1 at VMworld 2015, including VSAN stretched cluster for high availability across data centers, a new 2-node VSAN model for remote-office/branch-office (ROBO), new hardware support for Intel NVMe and Diablo Ultra DIMM, and the additional features added to the health check plugin. You can read more about these announcements here. VMware has…

A brief overview of the new Virtual SAN 6.1

With the announcements just made at VMworld 2015, the embargo on Virtual SAN 6.1 has now been lifted, so we can now discuss publicly some of the new features and functionality. Virtual SAN is VMware’s software-defined solution for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). For the last number of months, I’ve been heavily involved in preparing for the Virtual SAN 6.1 launch. What follows is a brief description of what I find to be the most interesting and exciting of the upcoming features in Virtual SAN 6.1. Later on, I will follow-up with more in-depth blog posts on the new features and functionality.

A first look at Cohesity

I mentioned in an earlier post that Cohesity were one of the vendors that I wanted to check out at VMworld 2015. These guys have only literally exited stealth. Just yesterday, I sat in on a webinar from Nick Howell, who I know extremely well from his days in technical marketing over at NetApp. Nick has now joined Cohesity as the role of an evangelist, which I think is a great move on Cohesity’s part. On Nick’s webinar, he introduced us to the vision behind Cohesity’s product, what they hope to fix in a customer’s environment and some teasers regarding…

A first look at ClearSky Data

I had a heads-up recently on a new company, ClearSky Data, who only exited stealth today. I want to make it clear that I have not yet been briefed by the folks from ClearSky, but I am definitely hoping to chat with them at VMworld 2015 (they’ll be at booth 441). Therefore a lot of what I have in this post is conjecture on my behalf. It seems to me that their goal is to help change how enterprise IT teams buy, manage and optimize their storage. Instead of consuming traditional storage arrays (alongside backup and disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure)…

Rubrik 2.0 is out, with a new model and a new service

Rubrik, who exited stealth only a few months ago, and launched their r300 series of converged data management appliance, have just announced version 2.0. You can read up of the Rubrik launch here. The 2.0 version has a new service called “Unlimited Replication” and a new appliance to the r300 series, the r348 “Hybrid Cloud Appliance”. Rubrik co-founder and CEO, Bipul Sinha, stated in the press release that Rubrik continues to transform “how companies approach data protection and recovery at scale”.

vROps Management Pack for Storage Devices 6.0.2 is GA

Today sees the release of the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Storage Devices (MPSD) version 6.0.2. This is exciting for me as it means that vROps now has management and monitoring features for Virtual SAN 6.0.  The management pack comes with a set of default dashboards for Virtual SAN clusters, as well as the ability to monitor and create proactive alerts/notifications based on VSAN events. I took the vROps Management Pack for a spin a little while back, and used it on my own lab cluster. Included below are a few of the features that it has.