VMdamentals

Archive for the ‘Storage’ Category

Tonight my home-built Nexenta-VM decided to reboot itself during my nightly backup cycle. Not too nice, but it recovered without too much hassle by itself. Even though the NFS shares were available again, my vSphere 5.1 environment now has a pretty large number of VMs that have become grayed out (Inaccessible), even though they are still accessible on the NAS shares. Easily solved, if you know how…

What it looks like

We start with an email I found in my Inbox, stating that my Nexenta-VM had a problem and was rebooted at 1:26AM. After the reboot all the shares became available again, but my vSphere environment was left in a mess: Read the rest of this entry »

After a long time I want to continue my series on building out your own home lab. Up next: Storage. What to choose, how to build it? I will be focussing on building out shared storage in this blog post. Yes you could use local disks just fine without sharing them outside that one box, but that is not where the hard choices lie. Once you decide you want shared storage, the questions start to pop up and decisions have to be made.

Different approaches to storage in your home lab

Before you start buying disks or SSDs, first things first. To begin with it is very important to make some base decisions. Some the most important Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I did a presentation at the Dutch VMUG event around SDDC with a techical focus on the storage bits and pieces you could build inside the hypervisor to accomodate this. I want to share this presentation with you together with a little background on the subject.

Software Defines Virtually Everything

VMware has taken a big step towards the Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC). This is where things are going for sure (also see my related post Cool Tech Preview: VMware’s distributed storage). The idea is that since “everything” runs on x86 anyway, you can potentially run all code on a common platform. From that view, everything will run in software. Read the rest of this entry »

People who have been using VMware Data Recovery quickly discovered that this product had issues. VMware’s take on Data Recovery was that they wanted to have a backup product for the smaller shops with a short time-to-market. Too bad it was this product that drove a lot of users to Veeam or PHDvirtual because of its many problems. In secrecy VMware started working together with EMC’s BRS division to build a brand new backup product leveraging EMC’s Avamar technology under the codename “Project Toystory”. This product has seen the light of day as “vSphere Data Protection 5.1″ or vDP for short. In this post I will be looking into vDP version 5.1, which is actually the initial release.

Introduction to vSphere Data Protection 5.1

This is the first release of vDP, so actually a 1.0 version. I will not be expecting a fully feature-rich product, but one that actually WORKS would be nice. After all, it is a “free” product Read the rest of this entry »

Looking through VMware’s newly announced things at VMworld 2012, the one thing that stood out for me was vSAN or (vCloud) Distributed Storage technology. From what I’ve seen at VMworld sessions, the vSAN technology creates a “distributed storage layer” across ESX nodes in a cluster – yes, up to 32 of them. Disclaimer: Even though I work for EMC, I have NO further insite into this development, nor do I blog for EMC. These are my own thoughts and ideas.

Just a VSA on steroids or way more?

So what is this distributed storage technology? At the first glance, it would appear to be something much like the VSA, but its implementation would be more comparable to Read the rest of this entry »

At VMworld 2012 vSphere 5.1 was introduced. One of the features is “Enhanced vMotion”. Using Enhanced vMotion you can migrate between “shared nothing” hosts. Yes, you can now migrate live between local storage and shared storage as VMware has combined the storage vMotion and vMotion all-in-one. Cool new feature that can’t be missed, or just another tick in the box to keep up with Hyper-V in the announced Microsoft 2012 server?

Enhancements on vMotion called “Enhanced vMotion”

What a catchy name! So what does it do? Well, for one it allows you to Read the rest of this entry »

Announced this year at VMworld 2012 (Watch the Monday general session from 51:26) were several cool technologies coming from VMware in the near future that focus on storage, or rather vStorage: Virtual Volumes (vVols), Virtual SAN (vSAN) and Virtual Flash (vFlash?). So what is this all about, and where is it going?

Virtual Volumes or vVols

How SAN and NAS systems work today, is something that they have been doing for years: Take a bunch of disks, stripe data across Read the rest of this entry »

I have seen different implementations of read caching in arrays and even inside hosts, just to be able to cope with boot storms of VDI workloads. When using linked clones caching really helps; all the VDIs being booted perform massive reads from a very small portion of the infrastructure: the replica(s). VMware came up with a nice software solution to this: Why not sacrifice some memory inside the vSphere nodes to accommodate read caching there? This is what CBRC (vSphere 5) or Host Caching (View 5.1) is all about. And… It really works!

What happens during a boot storm

First of all, we need to figure out what happens during a boot storm. Even wondered just how much data Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow there will be an EMC Live Webcast around EMC’s VSI plugin called “How to simplify Management with EMC VSI plugin for VMware vSphere”. This webcast will be delivered by my colleague and friend Simon Seagrave (@Kiwi_Si at http://www.techhead.co.uk for those who know people by their twitter names!). I will be assisting in answering in the chat window, together with Josh Hutt, one of the VSI plugin developers!

The VSI plugin is a cool little plugin that allows for EMC storage to be integrated into vCenter. With separate menus and right-click integration using EMC storage straight from vCenter is a breeze. Provision storage, monitor storage, deploy fast clones or change path failover modes… The VSI plugin has it all.

Come join me, Simon and Josh in this webinar! You can subscribe for this webinar here.

It will run from 6/7/12 9:00 AM MDT to 10:00 AM MDT (America/Denver)

That is 15:30 through 17:00 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).

UPDATE: Read more info on the Webcast at Simon’s blog here.

Even though this blog mainly focusses on technical geeky things, it cannot be denied that as infrastructures grow, the deep-down technical details get covered up more and more by the sheer size of things. As customers need to grow their environments more and faster, they have a need to make things decide for themselves, automate more and more. Yesterday you bought boxes and cables. Tomorrow you buy a converged infrastructure like VCE’s Vblock. But what about today? EMC is about to fill that gap…

The Cake Story

To explain the difference between a build-your-own and a Vblock, there is this great story where the parallel is drawn to birthday cakes: Read the rest of this entry »