Upcoming Rubrik and VSAN webinar – October 11th

A number of months back, myself and Chris Wahl of Rubrik put together a comprehensive white paper discussing the role of storage policies in both Virtual SAN and Rubrik. Next week we are going to hold a joint webinar where we will once again discuss the role of policy driven storage. I’ll speak about the role of policies from a VMware/VSAN perspective while Chris will discuss the use of policies in the Rubrik environment. In essence we want to highlight how the use of policy based architecture can abstract away complexity when managing data. The event will take place on…

Docker Volume Driver for vSphere using policies on VSAN (short video)

This is a short demo (< 5 minutes) which highlights how one can use storage policies to manage the creation of a docker volume when that volume is being deployed on Virtual SAN. This does not cover the installation of the components required, as these have been covered here and there is another short video covering those steps here. Also, my good buddy William Lam has great step by step instructions on how to use VSAN policies for container volumes in his blog post here. This video just takes a very quick look at how the docker volume driver for…

VSAN Roadshow – South Africa – October 2016

A short post to let you know that I will be participating in a VSAN Roadshow event in South Africa next month. If you are in the Johannesburg or Cape Town area on October 25th and 27th respectively, and want to learn more about VMware’s Virtual SAN, you should definitely come along. I have lots to talk about, and hopefully some cool new VSAN updates from VMworld EMEA. I will also be providing an update on the various VMware projects in the Cloud Native Apps space (e.g. Photon Platform, vSphere Integrated Containers), especially around container persistence, so this may also…

See you at VMworld Barcelona [Updated]

With less than a month to go, I thought I’d let you know about what I’m up to at VMworld in Barcelona once more this year. Once again, the show is on at the Fira Gran Via, where it has been held since 2012. This makes it the fifth year in a row that the event has been held here. Anyway, on with what I’ll be doing. My session this year will be Virtual SAN day #2 operations. In this session, my good pal Paudie O’Riordan (that handsome guy in the picture on the left – his words, not mine)…

My VMworld Presentations on VSAN are now available

What a VMworld this has been for VSAN. The building momentum of this product is awesome to see, especially for those of us who have been evangelizing it from the beginning. The conversations have changed significantly this year. Previously it was all about “Why should I use VSAN?”. Now that the benefits of VSAN are obvious, the conversations this year were more technical and more around enablement, e.g. “How would I achieve X with VSAN, what are the points I need to consider when I use VSAN for Y, etc?”. As I mentioned in a previous post, this year I…

Using vSphere docker volume driver to run Project Harbor on VSAN

Project Harbor is another VMware initiative in the Cloud Native Apps space. In a nutshell, it allows you to store and distributes Docker images locally from within your own infrastructure. While Project Harbor provides security, identity and management of images, it also offers better performance by having the registry closer to the build and run environment for image transfers. Harbor also supports multiple deployments so that you can have images replicated between them for high availability. You can get more information (including the necessary components) about Project Harbor on github. In this post, we will deploy Project Harbor in Photon…

See you at VMworld 2016

I’m thrilled to have had a session accepted at this year’s VMworld. I’m also going to be a co-speaker on another session. As you might have guessed, both presentations are on Virtual SAN (VSAN), and I am co-presenting both sessions with my buddy Paudie O’Riordan. In the first session, we will be talking about how to conduct a successful proof of concept (PoC) on VSAN, which will cover how to prepare, how to test, and what gotchas you need to be aware of when going through a PoC with VSAN. This session, STO7535, will take place on Wednesday, September 1st…