Some time ago, I wrote about which policy changes can trigger a rebuild of an object. This came up again recently, as it was something that Duncan and I covered in our VMworld 2017 session on top 10 vSAN considerations. In the original post (which is over 3 years old now), I highlighted items like increasing the stripe width, growing the read cache reservation (relevant only to hybrid vSAN) and changing FTT when the read cache reservation is non-zero (again only relevant to hybrid vSAN) which led to a rebuild of the object (or components within the object). The other…
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…
Last week, I was presenting at the VMware User Group (VMUG) event in Poland. My topic was SPBM, Storage Policy Based Management. This is the framework for consuming data services, whether these are provided from vSAN, Virtual Volumes or VAIO (IO Filters). You can get the presentation from here. One of the attendees who had implemented Virtual Volumes (aka VVols) asked a very interesting question about changing policies of a VVol based VM on-the-fly. The question is whether a policy change causes a new VVol has to be instantiated, data synced to original VVol and then the original VVol is…
My Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) presentation slide deck is now available online. This is the presentation that I delivered at a number of VMUG (VMware User Group) meetings this year in Europe, primarily Norway and Poland. SPBM is an integral part of VMware’s software defined storage vision, and is deeply integrated into vSAN, Virtual Volumes (VVols) and VAIO, the vSphere APIs for I/O Filters. Hope you find it useful. 2017 VMUG Storage Policy Based Management from Cormac Hogan
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.
I was doing some work in the lab with Storage Policy Based Management recently. I was using both vSAN and a Virtual Volume array from Nimble Storage. While I was able to create independent policies for both vSAN and VVols, I was curious to see if I could create a policy where I could be offered both datastore types for the initial placement of a VM. For example, if I wanted to ensure my VM was encrypted, could I have a policy which would be compliant with both vSAN datastore and the Virtual Volume datastore, so long as they both…
Last week I wrote about the new vSAN management pack for vRealize Operations. This week sees another nice new storage feature/solution released. This time it is a solution to integrate vRealize Automation and Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM). For those of you who saw the VMworld 2016 keynotes, you may remember Yanbing Li demonstrating the ability to have a VM move to a completely new datacenter, based on storage policy compliance. In essence, if a VM exits compliance with its storage policy (for whatever reason), vRealize Automation SPBM integration can initiate a migration of this VM to a completely different…