What’s in the vSphere and vSAN 6.7 release?

Today VMware unveils vSphere version 6.7, which also includes a new version of vSAN. In this post, I am going to highlight some of the big-ticket items that are in vSphere 6.7 from a core storage perspective, and also some of the new feature that you will find in vSAN 6.7. I’ll also cover some of the new enhancements coming in Virtual Volumes (VVols).

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.

ATS Miscompare revisited in vSphere 6.5

Does anyone remember the ATS Miscompare issue? This blog post from 2 years ago might jog your memory. It is basically an issue that arose when we began using ATS, the VAAI Atomic Test and Set primitive, for maintaining the ‘liveness’ of a heartbeat in vSphere 5.5U2.  After making this change, a number of customers started to see “ATS Miscompare detected between test and set HB images” messages after upgrading to vSphere 5.5U2 or later. The HB reference in the message is shorthand for heartbeat. In previous releases, we did not use ATS for maintaining the ‘liveness’ of a heartbeat.…

vSphere 6.5 p01 – Important patch for users of Automated UNMAP

VMware has just announced the release of vSphere 6.5 p01 (Patch ESXi-6.5.0-20170304001-standard). While there are a number of different issues addressed in the patch, there is one in particular that I wanted to bring to your attention. Automated UNMAP is a feature that we introduced in vSphere 6.5. This patch contains a fix for some odd behaviour seen with the new Automated UNMAP feature. The issue has only been observed with certain Guest OS, certain filesystems, and a certain block sizes format. KB article 2148987 for the patch describes it as follows: Tools in guest operating system might send unmap…

VAAI now available with vSphere Standard Edition

A short post today, but it highlights what I feel is an important enhancement to vSphere licensing. I’ve had lots of questions recently about why VAAI (Storage APIs for Array Integration) is not available in the standard edition of vSphere. This is especially true since I began posting about Virtual Volumes earlier this year, and it was clear that Virtual Volumes is available in the standard edition. One reason why this was confusing is that if a migration of a VVol could not be handled by the array using the VASA APIs, the migration would fall back to using VAAI…

vSphere 6.0 Storage Features Part 8: VAAI UNMAP changes

A few weeks, my good pal Cody Hosterman over at Pure Storage was experimenting with VAAI and discovered that he could successfully UNMAP blocks (reclaim) directly from a Guest OS in vSphere 6.0. VAAI are the vSphere APIs for Array Integration. Cody wrote about his findings here. Effectively, if you have deleted files within a Guest OS, and your VM is thinly provisioned, you can tell the array through this VAAI primitive that you are no longer using these blocks. This allows the array to reclaim them for other uses. I know a lot of you have been waiting for…

vSphere 6.0 Storage Features Part 7: VAAI XCOPY improvements

The more astute of you who have already moved to vSphere 6.0, and like looking at CLI outputs, may have observed some new columns/fields in the PSA claimrules when you run the following command: # esxcli storage core claimrule list –claimrule-class=VAAI The new fields are as follows (slide right to view full output): XCOPY Use Array XCOPY Use XCOPY Max Reported Values  Multiple Segments  Transfer Size ————— —————–  ————– false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                   false                  0 false                  false                  0 false                  …