VSAN 6.0 Part 1 – New quorum mechanism

vSphere 6.0 released yesterday. It included the new version of Virtual SAN – 6.0. I now wish to start sharing some of the new features and functionality with you. One of things we always enforced with version 5.5 was the fact that when you deployed a VM with NumberOfFailuresToTolerate = 1, you always had at least 3 components: 1st copy of the data, 2nd copy of the data, and then a witness component for quorum. In version 5.5, for a VM to remain accessible, “one full copy of the data and more than 50% of components must be available”. We…

A brief overview of new Virtual SAN 6.0 features and functionality

The embargo on what’s new in vSphere 6.0 has now been lifted, so we can now start to discuss publicly about new features and functionality. For the last number of months, I’ve been heavily involved in preparing for the Virtual SAN launch. What follows is a brief description of what I find to be the most interesting and exciting of the upcoming features in Virtual SAN 6.0. Later on, I will be following up with more in-depth blog posts on the new features and functionality.

A closer look at Kaminario

As many of you are aware, I was at VMworld in San Francisco last week. I wrote a number of articles about some VMware storage announcements, such as EVO:RAIL, VAIO and VVols. However there were, as usual, quite a number of storage vendors at this years conference. One of the vendors that I really want to learn more about was Kaminario, an all flash array vendor that I’d heard a lot of things about. I had the pleasure of spending some time at the Kaminario booth with Shai Maskit who is a senior Product Manager with Kaminario. I posed my…