A closer look at EBS-backed vSAN

At VMworld 2018, we announced an initiative to use EBS, Amazon Elastic Block Store, for vSAN storage. At present vSAN is configured using the current EC2 i3 configurations, which run ESXi on bare-metal. I have seen these referred to as i3p, but my understanding is that they correlate to the i3.metal instances as shown here. The Amazon EC2 i3 instances include Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD-based instance storage. These are configured with 10TB of storage per host, but there are some limitations. For one, if you wish to expand on capacity, you need to add another complete EC2 i3 instance.…

VMworld 2018 vSAN Roundup – Monday, Aug 27th

VMworld is now officially underway, and as usual, day 1 is full of new announcements. vSAN is no exception. There have been announcements around the next release of vSAN (6.7U1), specific vSAN improvements to VMware Cloud on AWS, a Cloudera Hadoop validation on vSAN and a beta announcements. Since we’ve had quite a number of announcements,  I though I would try to capture them all in one place.

A first look at AWS Greengrass on vSphere

Last week, I had the pleasure to attend our CTO Ambassadors conference, hosted by our Global Field CTO Chris Wolf. This was an excellent week, especially for someone like me who works directly for a single business unit at VMware. It gave me great insight into the activities going on in our other business units at VMware. One of the highlights for me was our “Serverless” night, where I finally got an opportunity to learn about Serverless, Functions As A Service (FaaS), AWS Lambda and all that other stuff that I kept hearing about, but did not quite fully understand.…