Some time back, I looked at what it would take to run a container based Minio S3 object store on top of vSAN. This involved using our vSphere Docker Volume Server (aka Project Hatchway, and the details can be found here. However, I wanted to evaluate what it would take to scale out the Minio S3 object store on top of vSAN, paying particular attention to features like distribution and availability, and to examine the various data services that can be provided by both vSAN and Minio. I also wanted to take advantage of the new host-pinning feature in vSAN…
After receiving a number of queries about vSphere Fault Tolerance on vSAN over the past couple of weeks, I decided to take a closer look at how Fault Tolerant VMs behave with different vSAN policies. I wanted to take a look at two different policies. The first is when the “failures to tolerate” (commonly referred to as FTT) is set to 0, and the other is when the “failures to tolerate” is set to 1. The question is whether or not we could deploy VMs without any vSAN protection and allow Fault Tolerant VMs to protect them instead.
Hot on the heels of the vSAN 6.7 release, a new performance checklist for vSAN benchmarking has now been published on our StorageHub site. This is the result of a project that I started a few months back with my colleague, Paudie O’Riordan. It builds upon a huge amount of groundwork that was already done in this area by Andreas Scherr, one of our Senior Solutions Architects here in EMEA. The aim of this checklist is to get the best possible performance out of your vSAN deployment, typically during the Proof Of Concept (PoC) stage. We’ve had many situations where…
Today VMware has another cloud launch update, and this one is significant for many reasons. Our underlying goals of VMware Cloud are many. From an infrastructure perspective, the goal is to provide operational consistency no matter where the application is running, whether this is from an automation, security or governance perspective. But one thing that is often overlooked is what this operational consistency means to the developer. The goal, I feel, is to make it as simple as possible for developers to create their apps and make it as simple as possible to consume services that they might need for…
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to many readers that virtualization has brought (and continues to bring) huge benefits with regards to data center efficiency. I’m sure you are all aware of how virtualization allows you to do more with your servers; no more single server – single application paradigms. No longer do you have huge amount of compute resources left idle on your servers. By being able to run many operating systems and many applications simultaneously on the same single server (server consolidation), virtualization brought a halt to server sprawl and data center expansion for many of…
Some time ago, I wrote about which policy changes can trigger a rebuild of an object. This came up again recently, as it was something that Duncan and I covered in our VMworld 2017 session on top 10 vSAN considerations. In the original post (which is over 3 years old now), I highlighted items like increasing the stripe width, growing the read cache reservation (relevant only to hybrid vSAN) and changing FTT when the read cache reservation is non-zero (again only relevant to hybrid vSAN) which led to a rebuild of the object (or components within the object). The other…
A short post today to let you know about a new VMware training class that I helped to create. This new class is called VMware vSAN Production Operations, and is a new 3 day class delivered by our Education Services division. As you can imagine from the title, this class is geared towards administrators who are responsible for managing vSAN on a daily basis in a production environment. The class focuses primarily on operational considerations such as storage policy change impacts, hardware monitoring and replacement, scaling up and scaling out the cluster, data services (e.g. encryption), maintenance mode considerations and…