Category: Hyper-converged

vSphere 6.7 and vSAN 6.7 in the News

by pgkeilty, posted in Hyper-converged, Software Defined Storage, Uncategorized, VSAN

Yesterday was a big day for vSphere and vSAN with the launch of the 6.7 release. There are many great blogs written so rather than repeat the content, here’s a list with links.

VMware Written Content

VMware Web Site: What’s New: vSAN 6.7
VMware Virtual Blocks: Extending Hybrid Cloud Leadership with vSAN 6.7
VMware Virtual Blocks: What’s New with VMware vSAN 6.7
VMware Virtual Blocks: vSpeaking Podcast Episode 75: What’s New in vSAN 6.7
Yellow-Bricks.com: vSphere 6.7 announced!
CormacHogan.com: What’s in the vSphere and vSAN 6.7 release?
Tohuw.Net: The Art in the Architecture – vSAN & Shared Nothing

Industry Analyst Content

 

VMworld Hands-on-Labs – 9,640 Labs Were delivered by vSAN

by pgkeilty, posted in Cloud Foundation, HCI, Hyper-converged, SDS, Software Defined Storage, Uncategorized, Virtual SAN, VMware, VSAN, VxRACK

The Hands-on-Labs (HoL) at VMworld are always a big hit. A ton of work goes into putting them on and supporting them and everyone seems to love them. This was a big year for vSAN in the HoL. At VMworld Las Vegas, 11,444 labs were completed and the vSAN lab, HOL-1808-01-HCI – vSAN 6.6, was the #2 overall lab completed. Our NSX friends held the #1 spot.

The HoL’s were delivered from 5 different data centers. Each handled approximately 20% of the workloads. vSAN was the storage in 4 of the data centers. 2 of the 4 were VMware data centers running vSphere, NSX, and vSAN for software defined compute, network and storage. Another was IBM BlueMix (SoftLayer) built with VMware Cloud Foundation (vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and SDDC Manager). And the other was VMware Cloud on ASW also built with VMware Cloud Foundation (vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and SDDC Manager). The 5th data center was another VMware data center running traditional storage. This is a great Hybrid Cloud / Multi Cloud example leveraging 3 of our own datacenters and 2 of the largest public cloud data centers offering Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas).

 

VMware Cross Cloud Architecture

 

9,640 of the HoL’s were deployed across the 4 vSAN data centers. This represents 84% of the labs delivered at VMworld US were delivered by vSAN. To support the HoL’s, over 90,000 VM’s were provisioned in just 5 days. Actually, more than that since extra HoL’s are pre-provision that don’t all get used. This is a huge win for HCI and vSAN as it performed like a champ for this heavy workload.

These stats are too impressive not to share and they are a great testament to all the people that make it happen.

 

 

 

 

 

Nearly 10,000 vSAN Customers! Come hear from 4 of them at VMworld 2017!

by pgkeilty, posted in HCI, Hyper-converged, VMware, VMworld, VSAN

I started at VMware on the vSAN team 4 years ago when we had 0 customers. It’s been a pretty wild and fun ride to get to 10,000 but we’ve only just begun. Customers are seeing the benefits of HCI and vSAN for all sorts of use cases including mission critical applications, management clusters, VDI, ROBO, DMZ, test/dev, DR Sites, and IaaS at IBM Bluemix (formerly SoftLayer) and soon at Amazon with VMware Cloud on AWS.

Unfortunately, we cannot fit all 10,000 customers in one breakout session at VMworld, but we can fit 4. I’m hosting a breakout session titled:

vSAN Technical Customer Panel [STO2615PU]

(Now that the session has happened, here is the video recording:)

I hosted a similar session last year with Stanley Black and Decker, Synergent Bank, M&T Bank, and Baystate Health and it was a lot of fun with some great audience participation. For more information check here.

This year we are fortunate to have Sanofi, Sekisui, Travelers, and Herbalife join the panel. The format is this:

  • Introduce the Panel
  • Panelists introduce their company, their VMware environment, and their use of vSAN
  • Q&A – I will have some questions for the panel but we expect the audience questions to generate some great discussion.

Let’s meet the Panelists:

Joachim Heppner
Director, Virtualization Engineering Services
Sanofi

In 2016 this large pharma needed to refresh their Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) sites. After a successful proof of concept, 2+ Node vSAN on HPE ProLiant Servers was chosen. Since then, vSAN has been deployed for management clusters and VDI in USA and EMEA as well as in 2 of their 13 regional data centers. Next, Cloud Foundation is being considered to replace their legacy Blade servers & Storage arrays.

Michael DiBenedetto
Director, Global IT
Sekisui Diagnostics

In early 2014 this mid-size pharma needed to build a DR site and chose a 4 Node vSphere cluster with vSAN enabled. They used vSphere Replication and SRM to test and automate DR. They also moved their test and development environment to this cluster. This year they are replacing their production data center with HCI and vSAN.

Alexander Szwez
Senior Systems Engineer
Travelers

vSAN was chosen to support production and test/dev Hadoop workloads. Two other vSAN clusters are used for new application workload POC’s. In addition, 2 Cloud Foundation configurations, each with a management cluster and a VM workload cluster are being implemented to prove how the built-in automation simplifies operations.

Jaime Gurrola
Worldwide Manager of Linux & VMWare
Herbalife International of America

In early 2014 this nutrition company wanted to modernize their data center by automating IT to simplify application access and management and transform Windows delivery. Today they run vSphere and vSAN and are evaluating NSX in multiple call centers to support 4000 Horizon VDI across 5 ROBO sites and their primary data centers for mission critical applications. They’ve achieved great cost savings resulting in significantly reduced TCO while delivering exceptional performance to their users.

I’m looking forward to seeing many great friends and to meet new ones at VMworld. I hope you can come and participate and enjoy this session with these great guests.

vSAN IP Networking Versus Fibre Channel

by pgkeilty, posted in Hyper-converged, Software Defined Storage, Virtual SAN, VSAN

Today I was asked by a customer: “By taking all of our storage traffic off of our Fibre Channel network and putting it onto our IP network, won’t that cause major network congestion?”

Quick answer is no if you implement some form of traffic “Isolation”. There are many ways to achieve isolation of vSAN traffic. All of them are identical to how you would isolate NAS or iSCSI storage traffic.

vSAN traffic can be isolated using dedicate physical switches. But most customers implementations leverage existing core switches that support all other IP traffic. In this case, for vSAN, the strong recommendation is to create a dedicated VLAN for the vSAN traffic.

On the host side, you can dedicate physical NIC’s for vSAN traffic. Some customers do this but others find that shared physical 10GbE NICs (2 for redundancy) on hosts provides enough bandwidth. When doing this, it is recommend to implement vSphere Distributed Switches and then configure vSphere NIOC to allocate bandwidth shares for different vSphere traffic. Typically vSAN should be allocated 50% of the shares.

There is an updated networking design guide for more details on all of this here:

VMware® Virtual SAN™ Design and Sizing Guide 

vSAN Maintenance Mode Considerations

by pgkeilty, posted in HCI, Hyper-converged, SDS, Software Defined Storage, Uncategorized, Virtual SAN, VSAN, VxRail

There are 3 options when putting a host in maintenance mode when that host is a member of a vSphere Cluster with vSAN enabled.  You follow the normal process to put a host in maintenance mode, but if vSAN is enabled, these options will pop up:

  1. Ensure accessibility
  2. Full data migration
  3. No data migration

There’s a 4th consideration that I’ll describe at the end.

I would expect most virtualization administrators to pick “Ensure accessibility” almost every time.

Ensure accessibility

Before we investigate, I want to reinforce that vSAN, by default, is designed to work and continue to provide VM’s access to data even if a host disappears.  The default vSAN policy is “Number of Failures To Tolerate” equal to 1 (#FTT=1), which means a HDD, SSD, or whole host (thus all the SSD and HDD on that host) can be unavailable, and data is available somewhere else on another host in the cluster.  If a host is in maintenance mode, then it is down, but vSAN by default has another copy of the data on another host.

VMware documents the options here:

Place a Member of Virtual SAN Cluster in Maintenance Mode

Ensure accessibility

This option will check to make sure that putting the particular host in maintenance mode will not take away the only data copy of any VM.  There are two scenarios I can think of that this would happen:

  • In Storage Policy Based Management, you created a Storage Policy based on vSAN with #FTT=0 and attached at least 1 VM to that policy and that VM has data on the host going into maintenance mode.
  • Somewhere in the cluster you have failed drives or hosts and vSAN self-healing rebuilds haven’t completed. You then put a host into maintenance mode and that host has the only good copy of data remaining.

As rare as these scenarios are, they are possible.  By choosing the “Ensure accessibility” option, vSAN will find the single copies of data on that host and regenerate them on other hosts. Now when the host goes into maintenance mode, all VM data is available.  This is not a full migration of all the data off that host, its just a migration of the necessary data to “ensure accessibility” by all the VM’s in the cluster.  When the host goes into maintenance mode, it may take a little bit of time to complete the migration but you’ll know that VM’s won’t be impacted.  During the maintenance of this host, some VM’s will likely be running in a degraded state with 1 less copy that the policy specifies.  Personally, I think this choice makes the most sense most of the time, it is the default selection, and I expect vSphere administrators to choose this option almost every time.

No data migration

This option puts the host in maintenance mode no matter what’s going on in the cluster.  I would expect virtualization administrators to almost never pick this option unless:

  • You know the cluster is completely healthy (no disk or host failures anywhere else)
  • The VM’s that would be impacted aren’t critical.
  • All the VM’s in the cluster are powered off.

For the reasons explained in the “Ensure accessibility” above, its possible that the host going into maintenance mode has the only good copy of the data.  If this is not a problem, then choose this option for the fastest way to put a host into maintenance mode.  Otherwise, choose “Ensure accessibility”.

Full data migration

I would expect virtualization administrators to choose this option less frequently than “Ensure Accessibility” but will choose it for a couple of reasons:

  • The host is being replaced by a new one.
  • The host will be down for a long time, longer than the normal maintenance window of applying a patch and rebooting.
  • You want to maintain the #FTT availability for all VM’s during the maintenance window

Keep in mind, if you choose this option you must have 4 or more hosts in your cluster, and you don’t mind waiting for the data migration to complete.  The time to complete the data migration is dependent on the amount of capacity consumed on the host going into maintenance mode.  Yes, this could take some time.  The laws of physics apply.  10GbE helps to move more data in the same amount of time. And it helps if the overall environment is not too busy.

When the migration is complete, the host is essentially evacuated out of the cluster and all it’s data is spread across the remaining hosts.  VM’s will not be running in a degraded state during the maintenance window and will be able to tolerate the failures per their #FTT policy.

4th consideration

I mentioned there is a 4th consideration.  For the VM’s that you want protected with at least two copies of data (#FTT=1) even during maintenance windows, you have two options.  One is to set the #FTT=2 for those VM’s so they have 3 copies on 3 different hosts.  If one of those hosts is in maintenance mode and you didn’t choose “Full Data Migration” then you still have 2 copies on other hosts, thus the VM’s could tolerate another failure of a disk or host.  You could choose to create a storage policy based on vSAN with #FTT=2 and attach your most critical VM’s to it.  For more information on running business critical applications on vSAN see:

Running Microsoft Business Critical Application on Virtual SAN 6.0

I hope this helps in your decision making while administering vSAN.  I recommend testing the scenarios prior to implementing a cluster in production so you get a feel for the various options.

vSAN and Data-At-Rest Encryption – Rebooted (i.e. Part 2)

by pgkeilty, posted in HCI, Hyper-converged, SDDC, SDS, Software Defined Storage, SPBM, SSD, Uncategorized, VAIO Filters, VASA, Virtual SAN, Virtual SAN 6, VMware, VSAN, vSphere 6, VxRACK, VxRail

 

Encryption is here, now shipping with vSphere 6.5.

I first wrote about vSAN and Encryption here:

Virtual SAN and Data-At-Rest Encryption – https://livevirtually.net/2015/10/21/virtual-san-and-data-at-rest-encryption/

At the time, I knew what was coming but couldn’t say. Also, the vSAN team had plans that changed. So, let’s set the record straight.

vSAN

  • Does not support Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs) with encryption enabled.
  • Does not support controller based encryption.
  • Supports 3rd party software based encryption solutions like HyTrust DataControl and Dell EMC Cloud Link.
  • Supports the VMware VM Encryption released with vSphere 6.5
  • Will support its own VMware vSAN Encryption in a future release.

At VMworld 2016 in Barcelona VMware announced vSphere 6.5 and with it, VM Encryption. In the past, VMware relied on 3rd party encryption solutions, but now, VMware has its own. For more details, check out:

What’s new in vSphere 6.5: Security – https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/10/whats-new-in-vsphere-6-5-security.html

In this, Mike Foley briefly highlights a few advantages of VM Encryption. Stay tuned for more from him on this topic.

In addition to what Mike highlighted, VM encryption is implemented using VAIO Filters, can be enabled per VM object (vmdk), will encrypt VM data no matter what storage solution is implemented (e.g. object, file, block using vendors like VMware vSAN, Dell Technologies, NetApp, IBM, HDS, etc.), and satisfies data-in-flight and data-at-rest encryption. The solution does not require SED’s so it works with all the commodity HDD, SSD, PCIe, and NVMe devices and integrates with several third party Key Management solutions. Since VM Encryption is set via policy, that policy could extended across to public clouds like Cloud Foundation on IBM SoftLayer, VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware vCloud Air or to any vCloud Air Network partner. This is great because your VM’s could live in the cloud but you will own and control the encryption keys. And you can use different keys for different VM’s.

At VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas VMware announced the upcoming vSAN Beta. For more details see:

Virtual SAN Beta – Register Today! – https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2016/09/07/virtual-san-beta-register-today/

This vSAN Beta includes vSAN encryption targeted for a future release of vSphere. vSAN Encryption will satisfy data-at-rest encryption. You might ask why vSAN Encryption would be necessary if vSphere has VM Encryption? I will say that you should always look to use VM Encryption first. The one downside to VM Encryption is that since the VM’s data is encrypted as soon as it leaves the VM and hits the ESXi kernel, each block is unique, so no matter what storage system that data goes to (e.g. VMware vSAN, Dell Technologies, NetApp, IBM, HDS, etc.) that block can’t be deduped or compressed. The benefit of vSAN encryption will be that the encryption will be done at the vSAN level. Data will be send to the vSAN cache and encrypted at that tier. When it is later destaged, it will be decrypted, deduped, compressed, and encrypted when its written to the capacity tier. This satisfies the data-at-rest encryption requirements but not data-in-flight. It does allow you to take advantage of the vSAN dedupe and compression data services and it’s one key for the entire vSAN datastore.

It should be noted that both solutions will require a 3rd party Key Management Server (KMS) and the same one can be used for both VM Encryption and vSAN Encryption. The KMS must support the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) 1.1 standard. There are many that do and VMware has tested a lot of them. We’ll soon be publishing a list, but for now, check with your KMS vendor or your VMware SE for details.

VMware is all about customer choice. So, we offer a number of software based encryption options depending on your requirements.

It’s worth restating that VM Encryption should be the standard for software based encryption for VM’s. After reviewing vSAN Encryption, some may choose it instead to go with vSAN encryption if they want to take advantage of deduplication and compression. Duncan Epping provides a little more detail here:

The difference between VM Encryption in vSphere 6.5 and vSAN encryption – http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2016/11/07/the-difference-between-vm-encryption-in-vsphere-6-5-and-vsan-encryption/

 

In summary:

  1. Use VM Encryption for Hybrid vSAN clusters
  2. Use VM Encryption on All-Flash if storage efficiency (dedupe/compression) is not critical
  3. Wait for vSAN native software data at rest encryption if you must have dedupe/compression on All-Flash

 

Correlating vSAN versions with vSphere (vCenter & ESXi) Versions

by pgkeilty, posted in HCI, Hyper-converged, SDS, Software Defined Storage, Uncategorized, Virtual SAN, VMware, VSAN, VxRACK, VxRail

I often get asked if a certain version of vSAN can be deployed on a different version of vSphere. The answer is no. vSAN is built into the vSphere version. That means vCenter needs to be upgraded to the correct version of vCenter and all the hosts in the cluster need to be upgraded to the correct version of ESXi in order to get the features of that version of vSAN. Lastly, vSAN formats each disk drive with an on-disk format, so to get the full features of a specific release, you may need to update the on-disk format.

Here’s basically how everything breaks down:

  • If you have vSphere 5.5 (vCenter Server 5.0 & ESXi 5.0) then you have vSAN 5.5.
  • If you have vSphere 6.0 (vCenter Server 6.0 & ESXi 6.0) then you have vSAN 6.0.
  • If you have vSphere 6.0 U1 (vCenter Server 6.0 Update 2 & ESXi 6.0 Update 1) then you have vSAN 6.1.
  • If you have vSphere 6.0 U2 (vCenter Server 6.0 Update 2 & ESXi 6.0 Update 2) then you have vSAN 6.2.
  • If you have vSphere 6.5 (vCenter Server 6.5 & ESXi 6.5) then you have vSAN 6.5.
  • If you have vSphere 6.5.0d (vCenter Server 6.5.0d & ESXi 6.5.0d) then you have vSAN 6.6.
  • If you have vSphere 6.5 Update 1 (vCenter Server 6.5 Update 1 & ESXi 6.5 Update 1) then you have vSAN 6.6.1.
  • If you have vSphere 6.7 (vCenter Server 6.7 & ESXi 6.7) then you have vSAN 6.7

Here’s a more detailed matrix:

Version Release

Date

 Build

Number

 Installer Build Number vSAN Version vSAN

On-Disk Format

(Web Client)
ESXi 6.5 U2 2018-05-03 8294253 N/A 6.6.1 U2 5
ESXi 6.7 GA 2018-04-17 8169922 N/A 6.7 GA 6
ESXi 6.6.1 Patch 02 2017-12-19 7388607 N/A 6.6.1 Patch 02 5
ESXi 6.5 Express Patch 4 2017-10-05 6765664 N/A 6.6.1 Express Patch 4 5
ESXi 6.5 Update 1 2017-07-27 5969303 N/A 6.6.1 5
ESXi 6.5.0d 2017-04-18 5310538 N/A 6.6 5
ESXi 6.5. Express Patch 1a 2017-03-28 5224529 N/A 6.5 Express Patch 1a 3
ESXi 6.5. Patch 01 2017-03-09 5146846 5146843 6.5 Patch 01 3
ESXi 6.5.0a 2017-02-02 4887370 N/A 6.5.0a 3
ESXi 6.5 GA 2016-11-15 4564106 N/A 6.5 3
ESXi 6.0 Patch 7 2018-07-26 9239799 N/A 6.2 Patch 7 3
ESXi 6.0 Patch 6 2017-11-09 6921384 N/A 6.2 Patch 6 3
ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 11 2017-10-05 6765062 N/A 6.2 Express Patch 11 3
ESXi 6.0 Patch 5 2017-06-06 5572656 N/A 6.2 Patch 5 3
ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 7c 2017-03-28 5251623 N/A 6.2 Express Patch 7c 3
ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 7a 2017-03-28 5224934 N/A 6.2 Express Patch 7a 3
ESXi 6.0 Update 3 2017-02-24 5050593 N/A 6.2 Update 3 3
ESXi 6.0 Patch 4 2016-11-22 4600944 N/A 6.2 Patch 4 3
ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 7 2016-10-17 4510822 N/A 6.2 Express Patch 7 3
ESXi 6.0 Patch 3 2016-08-04 4192238 N/A 6.2 Patch 3 3
ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 6 2016-05-12 3825889 N/A 6.2 Express Patch 6 3
ESXi 6.0 Update 2 2016-03-16 3620759 N/A 6.2 3
ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 5 2016-02-23 3568940 N/A 6.1 Express Patch 5 2
ESXi 6.0 Update 1b 2016-01-07 3380124 N/A 6.1 Update 1b 2
ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 4 2015-11-25 3247720 N/A 6.1 Express Patch 4 2
ESXi 6.0 U1a (Express Patch 3) 2015-10-06 3073146 N/A 6.1 U1a (Express Patch 3) 2
ESXi 6.0 U1 2015-09-10 3029758 N/A 6.1 2
ESXi 6.0.0b 2015-07-07 2809209 N/A 6.0.0b 2
ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 2 2015-05-14 2715440 N/A 6.0 Express Patch 2 2
ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 1 2015-04-09 2615704 2615979 6.0 Express Patch 1 2
ESXi 6.0 GA 2015-03-12 2494585 N/A 6.0 2
ESXi 5.5 Patch 10 2016-12-20 4722766 4761836 5.5 Patch 10 1
ESXi 5.5 Patch 9 2016-09-15 4345813 4362114 5.5 Patch 9 1
ESXi 5.5 Patch 8 2016-08-04 4179633 N/A 5.5 Patch 8 1
ESXi 5.5 Express Patch 10 2016-02-22 3568722 N/A 5.5 Express Patch 10 1
ESXi 5.5 Express Patch 9 2016-01-04 3343343 N/A 5.5 Express Patch 9 1
ESXi 5.5 Update 3b 2015-12-08 3248547 N/A 5.5 Update 3b 1
ESXi 5.5 Update 3a 2015-10-06 3116895 N/A 5.5 Update 3a 1
ESXi 5.5 Update 3 2015-09-16 3029944 N/A 5.5 Update 3 1
ESXi 5.5 Patch 5 re-release 2015-05-08 2718055 N/A 5.5 Patch 5 re-release 1
ESXi 5.5 Express Patch 7 2015-04-07 2638301 N/A 5.5 Express Patch 7 1
ESXi 5.5 Express Patch 6 2015-02-05 2456374 N/A 5.5 Express Patch 6 1
ESXi 5.5 Patch 4 2015-01-27 2403361 N/A 5.5 Patch 4 1
ESXi 5.5 Express Patch 5 2014-12-02 2302651 N/A 5.5 Express Patch 5 1
ESXi 5.5 Patch 3 2014-10-15 2143827 N/A 5.5 Patch 3 1
ESXi 5.5 Update 2 2014-09-09 2068190 N/A 5.5 Update 2 1
ESXi 5.5 Patch 2 2014-07-01 1892794 N/A 5.5 Patch 2 1
ESXi 5.5 Express Patch 4 2014-06-11 1881737 N/A 5.5 Express Patch 4 1
ESXi 5.5 Update 1a 2014-04-19 1746018 N/A 5.5 Update 1a 1
ESXi 5.5 Express Patch 3 2014-04-19 1746974 N/A 5.5 Express Patch 3 1
ESXi 5.5 Update 1 2014-03-11 1623387 N/A 5.5 Update 1 1
ESXi 5.5 Patch 1 2013-12-22 1474528 N/A 5.5 Patch 1 1
ESXi 5.5 GA 2013-09-22 1331820 N/A 5.5 1

As a reference, see:

Build numbers and versions of VMware vSAN (2150753) – This is a new KB post that went up on July 31, 2017 which provides the same information as above.

Build numbers and versions of VMware vCenter Server (2143838)

Build numbers and versions of VMware ESXi/ESX (2143832)

Understanding vSAN on-disk format versions (2145267)

 

 

 

 

 

Replays of Virtual SAN Sessions at VMworld 2016 That You Didn’t Want to Miss

by pgkeilty, posted in HCI, Hyper-converged, Ready Nodes, SDDC, SDS, Software Defined Storage, SRM, Stretched Storage, Uncategorized, Virtual SAN, VMware, VSAN, VxRail

What a great week last week at VMworld 2016. I had many good meetings with customers, participated in 3 breakout sessions, met up with some old friends and met some new ones. If you missed VMworld, well, then you missed a bunch of great sessions. There’s no way you could have seen them all, so, VMware has made them available here: http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/2016.html.

I participated in two sessions:

The first one was a customer panel discussion on Tuesday afternoon. I need to thank Glenn Brown from Stanley Black & Decker, Mike Caruso from Synergent, Tom Cronin from M&T Bank, and Andrew Schilling from Baystate Health who all did a fantastic job representing themselves, their companies, and their use of Virtual SAN. We had great interaction from the audience with lots of good questions. For a replay of the session check this out:

Four Unique Enterprise Customers Deployment of VMware Virtual SAN [STO7560]
Glen Brown, System Engineer, Stanley Black and Decker
Michael Caruso, AVP Corporate Information Systems, Synergent
Tom Cronin, Sr. Staff Specialist – Platforms Engineering Group, M&T Bank
Frank Gesino, Senior Technical Account Manager, VMware
Andrew Schilling, Team Leader – IT Infrastructure, Baystate Health Inc.
Tuesday, Aug 30, 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

The other session I was involved in was on Wednesday and repeated on Thursday. I had the good fortune to present with two VSAN Product Managers who are responsible for making VSAN great. Vahid Fereydounkolahi is responsible for driving new features into the VSAN product and Rakesh Radhakrishnan is responsible for making sure all the vendor hardware components are properly qualified for VSAN and for looking out into the future of new technologies like NVMe and RDMA to adopt into VSAN. For a replay of the two sessions check these out:

Peter Keilty, Office of the CTO, Americas Field – Storage and Availability, VMware, Inc.
Rakesh Radhakrishnan, Product Management & Strategy Leader, VMware
Wednesday, Aug 31, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Vahid Fereydounkolahi kicked this one off discussion VSAN features, capabilities, and how it works, I took over in the middle to discuss Day 2 operations, and Rakesh Radhakrishnan finished it off discussing the Ready Node program as well as current and future flash and IO technology that VSAN incorporates or will incorporate.
Virtual SAN Technical Deep Dive and What’s New [STO8246R]

Thursday, Sep 01, 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Vahid wasn’t able to make this time so I kicked things off talking about VSAN features, capabilities, how it works, and Day 2 operations, and Rakesh Radhakrishnan finished it off discussing the Ready Node program as well as current and future flash and IO technology that VSAN incorporates or will incorporate.
Virtual SAN Technical Deep Dive and What’s New [STO8246R]

In my previous blog post I highlighted the sessions you wouldn’t want to miss. So here, I’ll provide the links to those sessions. A few either haven’t been uploaded yet or won’t because of legal or future looking reasons:

Christos Karamanolis is literally the brains behind VSAN since its inception and our chief visionary for Storage. If you want the whole picture wrapped up in a 1 hour session, this is it.
An Industry Roadmap: From storage to data management [STO7903]
Christos Karamanolis, VMware Fellow – CTO of Storage and Availability, VMware
Wednesday, Aug 31, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Continue reading “Replays of Virtual SAN Sessions at VMworld 2016 That You Didn’t Want to Miss” →

Virtual SAN Sessions You Won’t Want to Miss at VMworld 2016

by pgkeilty, posted in HCI, HCS, Hyper-converged, SDS, Software Defined Storage, Uncategorized, Virtual SAN, VMware, VSAN, VxRail

Shameless self-promotion here. I’m very excited to be presenting 2 sessions at the upcoming VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas. So, of course I think you shouldn’t miss them. The first is a customer panel session that I’ll be hosting. I’ve worked with each of these customers who have had VSAN running production workloads for well over a year. Everything wasn’t always perfect, but, they continue to expand their usage of VSAN in their data centers. In two of the customers, they are now standardized on VSAN for any new workloads. These customers will provide an overview of their deployments, answer some of my questions, then take questions from the audience.

Four Unique Enterprise Customers Deployment of VMware Virtual SAN [STO7560]
Glen Brown, System Engineer, Stanley Black and Decker
Michael Caruso, AVP Corporate Information Systems, Synergent
Tom Cronin, Sr. Staff Specialist – Platforms Engineering Group, M&T Bank
Frank Gesino, Senior Technical Account Manager, VMware
Andrew Schilling, Team Leader – IT Infrastructure, Baystate Health Inc.
Tuesday, Aug 30, 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

This VSAN Deep Dive session will cover features of the latest VSAN release, how they work, and some best practices for deploying VSAN. I’ll be presenting along with our lead VSAN Product Managers. This session will be held on two different days.

Virtual SAN Technical Deep Dive and What’s New [STO8246R]
Peter Keilty, Office of the CTO, Americas Field – Storage and Availability, VMware, Inc.
Rakesh Radhakrishnan, Product Management & Strategy Leader, VMware
Wednesday, Aug 31, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Thursday, Sep 01, 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.

Other VSAN Sessions You Won’t Want to Miss

There are so many great VSAN sessions it’s hard to pick just a few. So, here are the ones I am most familiar with that I’m confident will be great. But that doesn’t mean that some of the others won’t be.

Christos Karamanolis is literally the brains behind VSAN since its inception and our chief visionary for Storage. If you want the whole picture wrapped up in a 1 hour session, this is it.

An Industry Roadmap: From storage to data management [STO7903]
Christos Karamanolis, VMware Fellow – CTO of Storage and Availability, VMware
Wednesday, Aug 31, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Continue reading “Virtual SAN Sessions You Won’t Want to Miss at VMworld 2016” →

Webcast Virtual SAN Sizing and Design

by pgkeilty, posted in HCI, HCS, Hyper-converged, Ready Nodes, Uncategorized, Virtual SAN, VSAN, VxRACK, VxRail

Here are VMware Online Event Webcasts that I was a part of. The focus is on the hardware options for where you can run Virtual SAN and how to size and design. We don’t go too deep, but there is some useful info here. Check them out here: