With VMware Explore 2023 fast approaching, I thought it might be a good idea to give you some advanced notice about some of the VMware Data Services Manager activities that you will find at The Venetian in Las Vegas. First and foremost, I wanted to give a shout out to VMware Fellow, Christos Karamonolis. Christos is going to share VMware’s vision & strategy for data management. For years (decades?), VMware has been providing the underlying storage infrastructure for storing your bits, bytes and files. Think about how long VMFS has been available as a filesystem for your virtual infrastructure storage…
A very short post to let you all know about a new VMware Hands On Lab (HoL). This HoL is focused on getting started with VMware Data Services Manager (DSM). Many readers will have seen the multiple posts that I have been sharing since the beginning of this year on VMware DSM. Now you can get some “hands-on” with the product through the lab. We believe that one of the main use cases for VMware DSM is the self-service of database instances, notably for developers who quickly need to spin up a database instance as part of their testing process.…
HOL-SDC-1608, our VSAN hands-on-lab, has been updated for VSAN version 6.2. This lab contains a bunch of new VSAN 6.2 features including erasure coding (RAID-5/6), checksum, sparse swap and dedupe/compression. You can also see the new health check views, performance metric views and capacity views. Also included is a workflow that will guide you through configuring VSAN stretched cluster and remote-office/branch-office (ROBO) implementations, and how these features work with HA to restart VMs in the event of a failure. The whole lab is modularised, so you can simply look at the features that interest you. You can get access via…
Just in time for VMworld 2015, the guys over at Nexenta have given me a heads up on a new promotion that they are doing for Virtual SAN (VSAN) customers. Nexenta are giving away complimentary licenses for their NexentaStor product, which will allow Virtual SAN customers to do file services on top of VSAN.
I already wrote an article on the NexentaConnect for VSAN product after seeing it in action at VMworld last year. More recently, I had the opportunity to play with it in earnest. Rather than giving you the whole low-down on NexentaConnect, instead I will use this post to show the steps involved in presenting a file share built by NexentaConnect to a VM. In this case, the VM and the file share both reside on Virtual SAN. I will also show you how to simply revert to a point-in-time snapshot of the file share using NexentaConnect. To answer the common…
I’ve had an opportunity recently to get some hands-on with HyTrust’s Data Control product to do some data encryption of virtual machine disks in my Virtual SAN 6.0 environment. I won’t deep dive into all of the “bells and whistle” details about HyTrust – my good buddy Rawlinson has already done a tremendous job detailing that in this blog post. Instead I am going to go through a step-by-step example of how to use HyTrust and show how it prevents your virtual machine disk from being snooped. In my case, I am encrypting virtual machine disks from VMs that are…
Is it just me, or does VMworld seem to come around quicker these days? Anyway, it is great to have a couple of sessions in again this year, and yes – you guessed it, these are VSAN sessions once again. However, since I first posted this article, the content catalog for VMworld 2015 is now live. STO4572 – Successful Virtual SAN Evaluation/Proof-Of-Concepts This is an update on last year’s VSAN Proof-Of-Concept talk. A lot has changed in the last year, and the idea of this session is to fill you in on all the potential gotchas that you might encounter…