Earlier this month, I shared a post about my experiences with deploying VIO, VMware integrated OpenStack. One of the issues I highlighted was the fact that when I tried to create a network, it failed with a very unhelpful error message. The reason the network creation failed was due to a limitation with using a distributed switch (VDS). Instead I had to create what was known as a “provider network”, which is a special step needed for VDS networking. I am in the midst of an OpenStack training, and I’m trying to relate what I am learning on the training…
I hadn’t realized that we had now begun to use the LVM (Logical Volume Manager) in our vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) version 6.0. Of course, I found out the hard way after a network outage in our lab brought down our VCSA which was running on NFS. On reboot, the VCSA complained about file system integrity as follows:
I’ll start this post by stating straight up that I am no OpenStack expert. Far from it. In fact, the only reason I started to play with VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) was to get up to speed for a forthcoming OpenStack class that I am taking in next week. What I’ve documented here is a bunch of issues I ran into during the VIO deployment process. Hopefully these will prove useful to some folks who are also new to OpenStack and plan on going through the same exercise. I’m not going to describe VIO in any detail, nor any of…
A short post again today. For those of you who are considering evaluating Virtual SAN, our friends over at the VMware User Group (VMUG) are giving you the opportunity to trial VSAN for 6 months. This offer is only available to VMUG members, but joining VMUG is free. And really, if you are not already a member of your local VMUG, shame on you. This is a great way to get hands-on experience with VSAN. What are you waiting for? Click here to get your six month trial of VSAN. On the topic of VMUGs, I will be presenting on…
I had a query recently from a partner who was deploying VMware Horizon View 6.1 on top of an all-flash VSAN 6.0. They had done all the due diligence with configuring the AF-VSAN appropriately, marking certain flash devices as capacity devices, and so on. The configuration looked something like this: The they went ahead and deployed Horizon View 6.1, which they had done many times before on hybrid configurations. They were able to successfully deploy full clone pools on the AF-VSAN, but hit a strange issue when deploying linked clone pools (floating/dedicated). The clone virtual machine operation would fail with…
A couple of months back, I wrote a short article on Rubrik. They were just coming out of stealth mode and had started an early access program. Since they had not officially launched, there wasn’t a lot that I was allowed to say about the company, other than give a high level overview. As they have now officially launched their r300 series of products, along with news of a massive $41 million Series B of funding, I can now share some additional details about their products and technology. Just to recap on what Rubrik do, they are offering a converged…
A short post today, but it highlights what I feel is an important enhancement to vSphere licensing. I’ve had lots of questions recently about why VAAI (Storage APIs for Array Integration) is not available in the standard edition of vSphere. This is especially true since I began posting about Virtual Volumes earlier this year, and it was clear that Virtual Volumes is available in the standard edition. One reason why this was confusing is that if a migration of a VVol could not be handled by the array using the VASA APIs, the migration would fall back to using VAAI…