I’ve had an opportunity recently to get some hands-on with HyTrust’s Data Control product to do some data encryption of virtual machine disks in my Virtual SAN 6.0 environment. I won’t deep dive into all of the “bells and whistle” details about HyTrust – my good buddy Rawlinson has already done a tremendous job detailing that in this blog post. Instead I am going to go through a step-by-step example of how to use HyTrust and show how it prevents your virtual machine disk from being snooped. In my case, I am encrypting virtual machine disks from VMs that are…
Is it just me, or does VMworld seem to come around quicker these days? Anyway, it is great to have a couple of sessions in again this year, and yes – you guessed it, these are VSAN sessions once again. However, since I first posted this article, the content catalog for VMworld 2015 is now live. STO4572 – Successful Virtual SAN Evaluation/Proof-Of-Concepts This is an update on last year’s VSAN Proof-Of-Concept talk. A lot has changed in the last year, and the idea of this session is to fill you in on all the potential gotchas that you might encounter…
Virtual SAN already has a number of features and extensions for performance monitoring and real-time diagnostics and troubleshooting. In particular, there is VSAN Observer, which is included as part of the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC). Another new feature is the Health Check Plugin, which was recently launched for VSAN 6.0. However, a lot of our VSAN customers are already using vRealize Operations Manager, and they have asked if this could be extended to VSAN, allowing them us to use a “single pane of glass” for their infrastructure monitoring. That’s just what we have done, and the beta for the vROps…
A short post again today. For those of you who are considering evaluating Virtual SAN, our friends over at the VMware User Group (VMUG) are giving you the opportunity to trial VSAN for 6 months. This offer is only available to VMUG members, but joining VMUG is free. And really, if you are not already a member of your local VMUG, shame on you. This is a great way to get hands-on experience with VSAN. What are you waiting for? Click here to get your six month trial of VSAN. On the topic of VMUGs, I will be presenting on…
I had a query recently from a partner who was deploying VMware Horizon View 6.1 on top of an all-flash VSAN 6.0. They had done all the due diligence with configuring the AF-VSAN appropriately, marking certain flash devices as capacity devices, and so on. The configuration looked something like this: The they went ahead and deployed Horizon View 6.1, which they had done many times before on hybrid configurations. They were able to successfully deploy full clone pools on the AF-VSAN, but hit a strange issue when deploying linked clone pools (floating/dedicated). The clone virtual machine operation would fail with…
With the release of VSAN 6.0, and the new all-flash configuration (AF-VSAN), I have received a number of queries around our 10% cache recommendation. The main query is, since AF-VSAN no longer requires a read cache, can we get away with a smaller write cache/buffer size? Before getting into the cache sizing, it is probably worth beginning this post with an explanation about the caching algorithm changes between version 5.5 and 6.0. In VSAN 5.5, which came as a hybrid configuration only with a mixture of flash and spinning disk, cache behaved as both a write buffer (30%) and read…
Today VMware announces the Virtual SAN 6.0 Health Check Plugin, a feature that will check your Virtual SAN configuration, both proactively and re-actively, and highlight any abnormal conditions found in the cluster. This is available to all our VSAN customers right now. Not only does it check the health of the cluster, but it also checks the state of the network, host connectivity, physical disk status, and underlying virtual machine object state. This is a great tool for ensuring that an initial deployment of VSAN or proof-of-concept has been rolled out successful, giving you confidence in your VSAN deployment. It…