After publishing the vSAN Networking Guide earlier this year, Paudie O’Riordain and I received numerous questions regarding support on having different stretched clusters hosting each other’s witness appliances. These queries arose because we discussed a 2-node (ROBO) topology which allowed this to sort of configuration (i.e. the cross hosting of witnesses) via special request. But in the networking guide, we explicitly stated that this was not supported with vSAN stretched clusters. However, after some further testing by our engineering teams, we can now relax this restriction if there are 4 independent sites hosting the different stretched clusters. In this case,…
Now that the US VMworld 2017 event in Las Vegas is over for another year, the focus turns to the VMworld 2017 event in Europe. This year, it once again takes place in Barcelona, Spain. A difference this year is that there is not much of a gap between US and European events, with the Europe event taking place in September this year rather than in October like it usually does. Just like the VMworld Las Vegas event, I am co-presenting on three sessions. In additional to that, in Barcelona, I am also hosting a number of Meet-The-Expert round-tables on…
Last week, I was rolling out Horizon View v7.1 on my new vSAN 6.6.1 all-flash configuration in the lab. Now, one of the pet peeves a few of us have had with this configuration was that a warning was always reported around read cache reservations on all-flash vSAN. Of course, read cache is irrelevant to all-flash (AF) configurations as it does not use a read cache; this is only applicable to hybrid vSAN configurations. This is why it was such as annoyance.
Many regular readers will be aware of new encryption features added recently to VMware’s portfolio, such as vSAN data-at-reset encryption and vSphere VM encryption in vSphere 6.5. I had to return to a configuration task that I hadn’t done in a while, which was the deployment of a new Key Management Server (KMS) on my vSphere 6.5 / vSAN 6.6.1 setup. I had done this a few times before, but it has been a while and I’d forgotten what exactly I’d needed to do, so I decided to document the steps in this post for future reference. Those of you…
For those of you who may have missed it, vSphere 6.5U1 was released very recently. This new release of vSphere also brought along a new release of vSAN, version 6.6.1. Included in this release are a few really nice features that did not make it into the major 6.6 release of vSAN that we had earlier this year. However some of these features are quite significant, especially as we work to make HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) more and more easy to deploy, configure and manage.
Like I usually do around this time of year, I wanted to share with you my plans for this year’s VMworld in Las Vegas. Hey, you might even like what you read about my sessions enough to sign up for one 🙂 Once again, I am completely HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) and storage focused. But what is really exciting for me this year is that I have some new people to co-present with. First of all, I’m presenting a vSAN network deep-dive with Andreas Scherr. Andreas manages all of our vSAN Proof-Of-Concepts in EMEA, and is a very smart cookie indeed.…
vSAN 6.6 shipped earlier this year. It comes with a new on-disk format to support, among other things, data at rest encryption (also known as DARE). This is version 5 of the on-disk format. I’ve been asked this question a number of times over the past week, so I thought I would quickly write a few words on whether or not enabling encryption on vSAN 6.6 requires an on-disk format change, more commonly referred to as a DFC. Now this post is not going to cover vSAN encryption in any great detail; I just want to answer this one question…