Many of you will have seen the recent announcement for Photon Controller version 1.1. For me, the interesting part of this announcement is the support for vSAN as a storage platform with Photon Controller v1.1. I should think that the first question that those of you are familiar with both vSAN and Photon Controller will ask is “how do I configure vSAN for Photon Controller when there is no vCenter server in the mix?”. This is a very good question, and one which I will highlight in this blog post. There are also a few line items in the release…
The first email I saw this morning in my inbox was from my good pal, Alan Renouf. Alan is our product line manager for APIs, SDKs, CLIs and Automation Frameworks (congrats on the promotion Alan). Anyway, Alan was announcing the General Availability of VMware vSphere PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1. There are a whole bunch of improvements in this release, and much kudos must go to the PowerCLI team. However from a vSAN perspective, things look really cool. [Update] This version of PowerCLI also works with vSAN 6.2 and 6.0, so there is no need for customers to upgrade to vSAN…
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…
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…
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…