I just spent a very useful week looking at how our customers might be able to protect vCenter Operations Manager (vCops) with VMware’s vSphere Replication (vR) and Site Recovery Manager (SRM) products. It was quite tricky to get this to work, if I’m perfectly honest, but that was the whole point of the exercise. What we learnt is being fed back to the various business units within VMware, to see if we can make this more intuitive and less complex to achieve, but if you are interested in knowing how to configure your DR infrastructure to protect vCops, please read…
A week or so ago, Duncan & I were given 4 e-book vouchers each from VMware Press for the Essential VSAN book. We decided that the easiest thing to do was to hold a competition to give-away the vouchers. We asked via twitter to give us a reason why you deserved the e-book, using the #essentialvirtualsan hash-tag. The best 8 tweets (and the ones which made us laugh) would get the e-book. These are the ones we selected:
It’s interesting how a number of conversations tend to pop up around the same issue in a short space of time. I read a very interesting thread from one of our support guys recently about trying to select the correct administrator credentials for the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC). RVC is a command line utility to manage various aspects of vSphere and has been extended to include VSAN functionality. The following day, I saw a thread on the VSAN forums for exactly the same thing – a customer experiencing difficultly logging into RVC on a remote vCenter server as administrator. The…
I’ve done a few posts in the past which discuss the VM Home Namespace object. To recap, the VM Home Namespace is where we store all the virtual machine configuration files, such as the .vmx, .log, digest files, memory snapshots, etc. I also highlighted that the VM Home Namespace is limited to 255GB in size. This led one reader to raise the following observation: It means that it is not possible to do a snapshot with memory for a VM with 256 GB of RAM. This is indeed correct. If you attempt to snapshot a VM (with memory) that has…
A couple of weeks ago the electronic version of Essential Virtual SAN was published and this week the first paper copies started shipping! Because of that, Duncan and I decided we will give away 4 e-books each. If you want to win one then please let us know why you feel you deserve to win a copy using the hashtag #essentialvirtualsan on twitter. Duncan and I will decide which 8 tweets will win an eBook, and of course we will favor the ones that make us laugh – it’s as simple as that! So just to be clear: Tweet why you…
I just learnt this morning that the paper edition of the Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) book that I wrote with my colleague and good pal Duncan Epping is now available. The e-book and kindle versions were available a couple of weeks ago, but its great to see the paper edition hit the shelves. The book will hopefully have all you need to get you up and running with VSAN, including architecture details and design considerations. We tried to include everything that someone involved in VSAN administration would need. I can now appreciate the time and effort that authors put into…
I was involved in an interesting thread recently with one of our VSAN partners regarding disk sizes used in VSAN, and what impact smaller drives may have. In an earlier post, I discussed reasons why VSAN would stripe a VMDK storage object even though a stripe width was not requested in the VM Storage Policy – Why is my Storage Object striped? In that post, I highlighted the fact that if the VMDK storage object is too big to fit onto the free space of a single hard disk, then it will automatically be striped across multiple hard disks. However…