New Book: VMware vSAN 8.0U1 Express Storage Architecture now available

I am delighted to announce the availability of a new book, VMware vSAN 8.0U1 Express Storage Architecture. Along with my colleagues, Duncan Epping and Pete Koehler, we have updated the vSAN deep dive book to focus on the new vSAN architecture which was announced with the vSphere & vSAN 8.0 releases. We held off publication as we were aware of a number of upcoming enhancements in 8.0U1. Now that this release is generally available, the book includes all of the new features and functionality found in the 8.0U1 release. Please note that we made a decision not to focus on…

vSphere with Tanzu – Multi-Zone Preview

One of the most interesting announcements for me at VMware Explore 2022 was around the introduction of vSphere Zones. This feature, when it becomes available with vSphere 8.0, enables vSphere with Tanzu deployments to be rolled out across geographically dispersed vSphere clusters placed in separate racks in a single physical datacenter, as per the release notes. This provides an extra level of availability that wasn’t previously possible. This extra availability is not just for the Supervisor Cluster, but also for the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters deployed by the TKG service. And indeed, it provides additional availability to the applications running on…

VMware Explore 2022: What’s new in vSphere 8 & vSAN 8

VMware Explore 2022 kicked off this week. There are of course many announcements taking place across the whole suite of VMware products. In this post, I will focus primarily on the announcements related to the products that I work with on a regular basis. Those products are vSphere 8, vSphere Tanzu Standard (vSphere with Tanzu), and vSAN 8. vSphere 8 In the vSphere 8 space, the most significant announcement in my opinion is the fact that we are delivering on Project Monterey. We got our first technical preview of Project Monterey back in 2020 by the VMware CTO, Kit Colbert.…

A closer look at vSphere+ and vSAN+

At this stage, I guess that most readers will already be aware of the recent announcement around vSphere+ and vSAN+. I’m sure many readers are also aware that VMware is on a multi-cloud journey, with a goal of offering the benefits of cloud to on-premises vSphere deployments. vSphere+ and vSAN+ are some of the first steps we are taking at VMware to make this goal a reality. So what advantages does vSphere+ and vSAN+ give to customers? In this post, I will attempt to highlight some of those benefits. Centralized Management First and foremost, vSphere+ offers a new mechanism for…

Dynamic RWX volumes now supported in TKC in vSphere with Tanzu

Last week, a new release of Tanzu Kubernetes (v1.22.9) became available which allows Tanzu Kubernetes clusters deployed through the TKG Service (TKGS) on vSphere with Tanzu to support dynamic read-write-many (RWX) volumes. This now means that if vSAN File Service is available on the vSphere cluster where vSphere with Tanzu is enabled, volumes can be dynamically created which can be shared between multiple Pods. This is something that many customers have been waiting for, so I am delighted to see that it is finally available. There is one setup step needed in vSphere with Tanzu to enable this functionality. In…

MinIO Service deployment in vSphere with Tanzu [Video]

In this video, I demonstrate how to register a MinIO (S3 Object Store) vSphere Service in vSphere with Tanzu. This service is using the vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp) to provide persistent storage for the service. Once the MinIO service is registered, it may be installed on vSphere with Tanzu. This include a plugin which provides new menu options in the vSphere client. The demonstration goes on to show how to use these new menu options to deploy a MinIO S3 Object Store to a vSphere Namespace in vSphere with Tanzu.

Announcement! vSAN Deep Dive book updated for 7.0 U3

I am delighted to announce an updated version of the vSAN Deep Dive book. It’s been a while since we did an update to this book. The most recent version was for vSAN 6.7 U1. A lot has changed since then. We’ve seen the arrival of some significant features such as vSAN File Service and HCI-Mesh.  We have also seen vSAN positioned as a platform for Cloud Native Applications through integration with the vSphere CSI driver and Kubernetes. There have been plenty of other enhancements such as Compression Only support, Durability Components and changes around Capacity Management and reservations. In…