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…
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…
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.
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…
In this post, we will look at a relatively new announcement around support for vanilla or upstream Kubernetes clusters, vSAN stretched cluster and the vSphere CSI driver. There are a number of updates around this recently, so I want to highlight a few observations before we get into the deployment. First of all, it is important to highlight that a vSAN Stretched Cluster can have at most 2 fault domains. These are the data sites. While there is a requirement for a third site for the witness, the witness site does not store any application data. Thus all of the…
Last week, I wrote an article which described how to use a combination of vSAN Availability Rules with Tag Based Placement Rules in vSAN Storage Policies to select one specific vSAN datastore for object placement when many vSAN datastores might appear as compatible candidates. I create this short 3m30s video to show how to do this in practice.
I was recently working in an environment where my vCenter server was managing two vSAN clusters, each with its own datastore. I wanted to be able to choose which datastore to provision to via storage policy, but came across some unexpected behaviour. When I configured my vSAN Rule and my Tag Rule, it seems that both datastores would appear as compliant to the policy. I found out the reason, and decided to write it up as I had never known this was how policies AND and OR rules behaved until now. Setting up Tags I created a Tags Category called…