A few weeks ago I had to shutdown a vSAN Cluster temporarily for a planned site-wide 24 hour power outage that was blacking out a datacentre. With the amount of warning and a multi-datacentre design this wasn’t an issue, but I made use of vSphere tags and some Powershell/PowerCLI to help with the evacuation and …

Or “How I’ve come to love my vSAN Ready Nodes”

In the process of upgrading a vSAN ReadyNode cluster from ESXi 6.5 to 6.7 a warning appeared in the vSAN Health check. The first host in the cluster had gone through the upgrade and was now showing the warning “Controller driver is VMware certified” (Note 1 in the image below). The Dell HBA330 card was using an older …

One of the new developments that caught my eye at VMworld this year was the introduction of file services to the VMware vSAN software-defined storage platform. vSAN already offers VMDK storage to vSphere and the ability to host iSCSI volumes, but this feature will allow NFS and SMB file-shares to be hosted directly on …

This “HCI Futures” session at VMworld US was hosted by two VPs from the Storage and Availability Business Unit, plus a customer guest. It covered the new features recently added to the vSAN environment with the release of 6.7 Update 1, alongside discussion of the possible future direction of VMware in the …

vSAN licenses are assigned per-cluster, so whilst the total number of vSAN licenses in a vCenter inventory might match the total number of vSAN host CPUs, they may not be assigned correctly to the clusters.

There are three major editions* of vSAN 6.6 available - “Standard”, “Advanced”, and “Enterprise”- so other than price what’s the difference between the three?

What is vSAN?

This is a first post in a series on vSAN, VMware’s software-defined-storage offering. vSAN uses disks within the ESXi hosts to create a resilient scalable shared storage platform for the virtual infrastructure providing many of the features of SAN/NAS shared storage without the need for additional …

Wednesday morning and VMworld continues…

Here’s a look at my sessions from another day in Barcelona.

Day 2, Tuesday, is when the real meat of VMworld starts- kicking off with the General Session (a.k.a. Keynote) at 9am. We were expecting some big announcements and weren’t disappointed. Here’s a look at some of my sessions today- these are the highlights only and more detail will follow.