Video of HCI Spotlight Session from #VMworld now available #HCI3551KE

This week at VMworld in Barcelona, I was honored to  be able to  co-present the HCIBU Spotlight Session with our GM and SVP, John Gilmartin. I noticed that the full video is now available online on the VMworld Video site. If you want to learn more about how to Future Proof your Infrastructure with vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation, give it a watch. The cool demos, showing Cloud Native Storage, Site Recovery Manager support for vVols and Project Magna auto-tuning vSAN all start around the 30 minute mark. The full video is available here. Enjoy!

Recording of my VMUG France presentation now available

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at the French VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting in Paris. The local VMUG team did an awesome job with respect to the logistics, and even had someone on-site to record all of the sessions. The team just sent me the recording of my presentation, which I am delighted to be able to share with you. If you’re interested in learning more about vSAN 6.7U3, Kubernetes and Cloud Native Storage, this recording should help. And don’t worry – only the first few sentences are in my very terrible French 🙂 Encore merci équipe…

vSAN 6.7 U3 New Advanced Options

Today’s blog post highlights two new Advanced Option in vSAN 6.7 U3. The first of these is Large Cluster Support. Today, in vSAN 6.7 U3, we are now able to configure support for large vSAN clusters (i.e. clusters that are over 32 nodes in size) with a single Advanced Option. In the past, you would have needed to go to each host in the cluster and make various advanced setting changes on a host by host basis such as TcpipHeapMax. Being able to set a single cluster wide Advanced Option does simplify things very much. Below is a screenshot taken…

Two short video demos – CNS and Velero 1.1

I put together a few short (7 – 8 minute) videos to show off some new functionality that we’ve recently added in vSphere 6.7U3, as well as our new Velero v1.1 in action. The first video is on CNS, the VMware Cloud Native Storage feature which we included in vSphere 6.7U3. This demonstration involves the deployment of a Cassandra database on Kubernetes, which incidentally uses the new CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver for persistent volumes. Once the application is deployed, we can see the characteristics of the volumes bubbled up in vSphere. We also see how using CNS, we can…

Introducing Project Magna – Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for vSphere self-driving operations

At VMworld 2018, Pat Gelsinger made reference to a project that was looking to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create self driving operations for the vSphere stack. At VMworld 2019 last week, we were given a tech preview of the first iteration of this effort, called Project Magna. There were a number of VMworld break-out sessions dedicated to this effort, and I will reference them near the end of this post. However, this first tech preview is focused solely on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), namely vSAN. It is an interesting choice to start with, since we position vSAN as…

What’s new in vSAN 6.7U3?

With all the buzz at VMworld 2019 this week, I thought I would highlight some of the cool new features that have been introduced with vSAN 6.7U3. In this release, there are 3 areas of focus, namely Unified Management, Intelligent Operations and Enhanced Performance and Availability. Let’s take a closer look at each of these. Unified Management Cloud Native Storage The primary initiative to providing unified management is our Cloud Native Storage feature. I’ve already blogged about CNS in a previous post. This is basically giving our vSAN Administrators the ability to gain insight into both virtual machine storage as…

vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive book now available in Traditional Chinese

A very short post to highlight to my Asian readers that the vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive book has now been translated into Traditional Chinese by Taiwanese company DrMaster. If you are interested in picking up a copy, we have been provided with the following links to web sites where you can purchase the book. This is opportune timing, as VMware has only just announced the newest release of vSAN, version 6.7 U3. Here are the links provided by DrMaster to online book stores in Asia where the book can be found. Tenlong Computer Books. This is the most famous…