Preventing selection of certain datastores with SPBM

One of the great things about presenting at VMware User Group meetings is actually talking to customers and finding out about what their pain points are, and how  VMware can improve on our products and features. At the most recent VMUG I attended (in Poland), I was asked a question about storage policies, and if there was a way to  allow some users to use some policies, and other users to use a different policy. Unfortunately there is no permissions associated with policies at this time, so any user can select any policy. With that in mind, I had a…

Compare and Contrast – VSAN and VVols

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to meet with a number of VMware customers in both Singapore and in the UAE. Most of the sessions were enablement and education type sessions, where there was a lot of white-boarding of VSAN (VMware’s hyper-converged infrastructure product) and Virtual Volumes (VVols – Software Defined Storage or SDS for the storage arrays). This wasn’t a sales session; I’m not in sales. The objective of these sessions was simply to educate. I guess when you are immersed in this stuff 24×7, it easy to fall into the trap of believing that everyone is well…

VMworld 2014 – Storage News Part 2

I guess the next big tech preview at this year’s VMworld was around Virtual Volumes. Yes, we’ve done this before, but this year there were so many vendors showing demos of their VVol implementation, and so many presentations/sessions on the topic that I believe folks are beginning to realize that we are very close indeed to finally having this feature ready. It’s hard to believe that this was first discussed at VMworld 2011, and I alluded to this when I presented a VVol session that I co-delivered with the folks from Nimble Storage at this year’s VMworld. This topic is…