bright ideas

Yesterday saw the release of vSphere 6.0 Update 2 and, as part of that, includes the 4^th release of VMware’s Virtual SAN: 6.2.

Since the announcement in February, VMware have been more active in promoting certain features that, in their mind, makes an All Flash solution affordable: Deduplication and Compression, and Erasure Coding.

VMware’s VSAN, as a solution, has many virtues. However, with the wide range of HCL-compliant hardware and software configurations there are bound to be some problems. One of these is described in VMware KB 2135494 - which is specific to running VSAN on Dell servers with the PERC H730 storage controller. It primarily describes the recommended I/O controller driver and firmware combination to avoid drive failure states.

I have been an avid VMware VSAN user for two years now, and whilst I am incredibly impressed by how it performs at scale, I feel there are three considerations that need to clarified with regards to how VSAN works, and how its technology has a profound impact on the usability of two and three-node deployments.

Nick Bowie, ViFX Solution Architect, discusses his VCDX experience and how he achieved such a prestigious certification.

"Congratulations! You passed! It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the VMware Certified Design Expert community. Your VCDX number is 202", from VMware.

It's been a couple of weeks since receiving that email, so I thought it was time I carried on the tradition of describing my VCDX journey.

I've been brushing up on my William Deming recently so I've been thinking a lot about change and how change does not always come easily. Markets keep changing and companies, as well as people, need to learn to adapt.

Some conferences just tell us what we already know, while others offer far more excitement and value. We’re definitely glad not to have missed an action-packed VMworld conference in San Francisco that saw VMware’s major announcement of EVO:RAIL. The level of investment the savvy VMware folks are putting into hyper-convergence is proof that this is not just hype, but truly the way forward.

Over the last six months we have been hearing a lot about VMware’s Virtual SAN solution, and how it will shake up the industry by providing the first true Software Defined Storage platform. But what is it really, and why would you use Virtual SAN vs traditional storage?