VSAN Part 12 – SPBM extensions in RVC

In the Virtual SAN (VSAN) beta refresh, we released a number of new Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) commands to examine the Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) settings. For those of you who have been participating in the beta, you will know that to deploy a virtual machine on VSAN, you create a storage policy for the virtual machine, which may stipulate the number of mirror copies of the virtual machine disk (FailuresToTolerate) or indeed a stripe width for the VMDK. SPBM is the underlying technology which controls this aspect of VSAN. In this post, we can look at some of…

A closer look at SolidFire

All Flash Arrays continue to make the news. Whether it is EMC’s XtremIO launch or Violin Memory’s current market woes, there is no doubt that AFAs continue to generate a lot of interest. Those of you interested in flash storage will not need an introduction to SolidFire. These guys were founded by Dave Wright (ex-RackSpace) and have been around since 2009. I have been trying to catch up with SolidFire for sometime as I’d heard their pitch around Quality of Service on a per volume basis and wanted to learn more, especially how it integrated with vSphere features. Recently I…

vSphere 5.5 Storage Enhancement Part 7 – LUN ID/RDM Restriction Lifted

About a year ago I wrote an article stating that Raw Device Mappings (RDM) continued to rely on LUN IDs, and that if you wished to successfully vMotion a virtual machine with an RDM from one host to another host, you had to ensure that the LUN was presented in a consistent manner (including identical LUN IDs) to every host that you wished to vMotion to. I recently learnt that this restriction has been lifted in vSphere 5.5. To verify, I did a quick test, presenting the same LUN with a different LUN ID to two different hosts, using that…

VSAN Part 11 – Shutting down the VSAN cluster

In a post on the vSphere blog, I spoke about how to use maintenance mode. As a follow on request, a number of people asked me how they should safely shutdown a VSAN cluster. In this post, I will address that question and share my observations. On my three-node VSAN cluster, I had a number of virtual machines as well as a vApp running vCenter Operations Manager VMs. My first step was to shut down all virtual machines in my cluster.

A closer look at EMC ScaleIO

Thanks to our friends at EMC, I was recently given the chance to attend a session on EMC’s new storage acquisition, ScaleIO. This acquisition generated a lot of interest (and perhaps some confusion) as VMware Virtual SAN product seemed to play in that same storage area. My good friend Chad Sakac over at EMC wrote about this some 6 months ago in his evocatively titled blog post VSAN vs. ScaleIO fight! Chad explains where, in his opinion, each product can be positioned and how EMC/VMware customers have a choice of storage options. His article is definitely worth a read.  I…

vSphere 5.5 Storage Enhancement Part 6 – Rename Files using SvMotion

This is something which comes up a lot. In the past, many people used a by-product of the Storage vMotion operation to rename all of the files associated with a virtual machine. In this vSphere 5.1U1 post, I mentioned that we brought back this functionality but you had to set an advanced parameter to make it work. Well, in vSphere 5.5, it works without the advanced option. The following blog post shows you this rename of virtual machine files using Storage vMotion in vSphere 5.5 to rename all of the files associated with a virtual machine.

vSphere 5.5 Storage Enhancements Part 5: VR/ SvMotion/SDRS Interop

I wrote about this issue on the vSphere blog some time back. Essentially, the issue described in that post was if a VM that was being replicated via vSphere Replication was migrated to another datastore, it triggered a full resync because the persistent state files (psf) which tracks the changes were deleted. All of the disks contents are then reread and check-summed on each side. This can have a significant impact on vSphere Replication’s RPO (Recovery Point Objective).