What’s new in vSAN 6.7U3?

With all the buzz at VMworld 2019 this week, I thought I would highlight some of the cool new features that have been introduced with vSAN 6.7U3. In this release, there are 3 areas of focus, namely Unified Management, Intelligent Operations and Enhanced Performance and Availability. Let’s take a closer look at each of these. Unified Management Cloud Native Storage The primary initiative to providing unified management is our Cloud Native Storage feature. I’ve already blogged about CNS in a previous post. This is basically giving our vSAN Administrators the ability to gain insight into both virtual machine storage as…

iSCSI on vSAN Stretched Cluster

vSAN readers will most likely be aware that we introduced support for iSCSI on vSAN way back in vSAN 6.5. That is to say, we had the ability to create iSCSI targets and LUNs using vSAN objects, and present the LUNs to external iSCSI initiators. That release also supported Persistent Group Reservations (PGRs) but it did lack transparent failover. We followed this up with an enhancement in vSAN 6.7 which enabled transparent failover. This enabled support for features like Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) to work on iSCSI on vSAN, if using shared disk mode as it uses reservations on…

VMworld 2017 Session on vSphere 6.5 Core Storage now on YouTube

A quick note to let you know that the session that I delivered on day 1 of VMworld 2017 is now available on YouTube. The session is entitled “A Deep Dive into vSphere 6.5 Core Storage Features and Functionality” and I delivered this with Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage. Judging by the feedback, and the number of passing comments I received in the hallways at VMworld over the past 2 days, it seems that this session was very well received indeed. Hope you like it.

vSphere 6.5 Core Storage White Paper Now Available

I’m delighted to announce the availability of a new vSphere 6.5 core storage white paper. The paper covers new features such as VMFS-6 enhancements, policy driven Storage I/O Control, policy driven VM Encryption, NFS and iSCSI improvements and of course new limit increases in vSphere 6.5. There are too many VMware folks to thank for putting this paper together, but you’ll find them all listed in the acknowledgements section. I do want to mention one person however; a very special thanks to Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage who spent a lot of time testing many of these new features, and…

What’s new in Virtual SAN 6.5

I know that there will be a lot of information coming your way from various sources on this exact topic. Obviously, I would urge you to check out the latest and greatest documentation from our technical marketing guys for deeper detail and “how-to” guides. However, I did want to provide a brief overview of what new VSAN features are available in vSphere 6.5. Note that we also refer to this version of VSAN as 6.5.

What’s new in vSphere 6.5 Core Storage

Hello from VMworld EMEA in Barcelona. Well, we can finally talk about vSphere 6.5 today. In this post, I want to highlight a number of new and enhanced features that you will find in vSphere 6.5 related to core storage. I am not going to discuss Virtual SAN (VSAN), Virtual Volumes (VVols) or I/O Filter enhancements (VAIO) specifically in this post, although you will no doubt see some new features tie directly into the latter. Instead, I want to talk about those features that are specific to core storage.

Pure Storage adds vCenter Web Client Plugin, VAAI, iSCSI & more to new release

Pure Storage are an all-flash enterprise storage company. I first met these guys at VMworld 2011 and was quite impressed by their product. Like many Flash Array vendors at the time, there wasn’t a great amount of vSphere integration features. However, with this latest release of Purity v2.5, Pure Storage are addressing this and more. I had a chance to meet and discuss these new features with Matt Kixmoeller & Ravi Venkat of Pure Storage recently. Not only are they now VMware-Ready certified, but they’ve got a whole bunch of integration features. Let’s have a look at the features that…