I was with one of our large EMEA customers last week, and we talked quite a bit about the evolution of vSAN. This customer is already one of our larger vSAN customers with very many clusters, and many, many nodes. They have also been a great vSAN reference for us, having first deployed the initial vSAN 5.5 release. One point that hit home was that they found it was quite difficult to determine the various features and enhancements that were introduced in each vSAN release. They mentioned that having a quick reference would be useful as they could use it…
ESXi 6.0 Update 3 is now available. This update is significant for vSAN customers as there are a number of performance related issues addressed. The KB article detailing vSAN performance improvements can be found here, and the ESXi 6.0 U3 release notes can be found here. I wouldn’t necessarily write a blog post to highlight a KB or update release, but I think the improvements that have been made to vSAN performance in this update are very significant. Improvements include enhancements to the way that we do logging. In vSAN, every I/O operation is logged before being processed. We have…
Last month we announced the release of a new vROps Management Pack specifically for vSAN. Previously the vSAN Management Pack was bundled with the MPSD – Management Pack for Storage Devices. I wrote about this when it entered beta, way back in 2015. Well, for those customers who are only interested in monitoring vSAN, and didn’t want all the other parts of the MPSD, the new vSAN Management Pack is now a stand-alone offering, so no MPSD required. This new vSAN Management Pack focuses on 3 main areas of vSAN: (1) Health and Availability, (2) Performance Analysis and (3) Capacity…
My good pal Paudie and I are back in full customer[0] mode these past few weeks, testing out lots of new and upcoming features in future release of vSAN. Our testing led us to building a new vSAN stretched cluster, with 5 nodes on the preferred site, 5 nodes on the secondary site, and of course the obligatory witness node. Now, it had been a while since we put vSAN stretched cluster through its paces. The last time was the vSAN 6.1 release, which led us to create some additional sections on stretched cluster for the vSAN Proof Of Concept…
The answer is an emphatic yes. One can absolutely use storage policies with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). However, there is currently no way to specify a policy at the docker CLI when creating a container (at this time). Therefore one would have to deploy the VCH, then deploy the container, and then finally modify the storage policy as appropriate. My understanding is that consideration is being given to a way to do this at deployment time, but at the present, it involves a number of steps. Let’s discuss them in turn.
I know that there will be a lot of information coming your way from various sources on this exact topic. Obviously, I would urge you to check out the latest and greatest documentation from our technical marketing guys for deeper detail and “how-to” guides. However, I did want to provide a brief overview of what new VSAN features are available in vSphere 6.5. Note that we also refer to this version of VSAN as 6.5.
If you missed our joint Rubrik and Virtual SAN webinar earlier this week, you can now view it online. In this webinar, the indefatigable Chris Wahl, Chief Technology Evangelist from Rubrik, and myself discuss the merits of policy driven architecture, with particular focus on VSAN and of course Rubrik. The primary goal is to demonstrate the simplicity of a policy-driven approach. We hope you like it. By the way, a joint VSAN+Rubrik white paper is still available if you would like to learn more details about both products, as well as their respective synergies. Kudos to the Rubrik team (especially…