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 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.

Does Storage DRS work with Adaptive Queuing?

Many of you will be aware that Storage DRS uses Storage I/O Control (SIOC) for load balancing based on I/O metrics. However a statement in one of our white papers has raised a few questions recently with both our customers and partners. The statement is as follows: “Queue depth throttling is not compatible with Storage DRS”. (pg.34) from  http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.5.pdf. This assertion led many to believe that Storage DRS would not work well with Adaptive Queuing (AQ), another of VMware’s queue depth throttling mechanisms. However internally, many felt that this wasn’t a true statement, but some work was needed to verify…