Planet vSphere-land

What is the future of virtual storage in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)? As more and more technology gets moved from hardware to software in the SDDC, I have to wonder which direction virtual storage will go. If we use networking as an example, the technology has evolved from setting up local virtual switches on each of the hosts to a virtual distributed switch (VDS) model where all the...

VMware is in an enviable but tricky situation: The company must work closely with hardware partners, keeping these prime sales and promotional channels happy and supportive. But VMware must also innovate around proprietary OEMs, subverting their products with integrated software before a rival steps up with an integrated alternative. This two-prong “coopetition” strategy has worked m...

Unless you are one of the few who have gone all solid-state devices (SSDs) for your virtual environment, hard disk drives (HHDs) still have a role. That role might be for primary storage of your VMs and/or their data, or as a destination target for backups, snapshots, archiving or as a work and scratch area. Or perhaps you have some HDDs as part of a virtual storage appliance (VSA), storage virt...

Storage hypervisors were a 2012 popular buzzword bingo topic with plenty of industry adoption and some customer deployment. Separating the hype around storage hypervisors reveals conversations around storage virtualization and virtual storage. Cloud and virtualization components Storage virtualization along with virtual storage and storage hypervisors have a theme of abstracting underlyi...

Fancy running a virtualized EMC VNX or Celerra instance in your own lab?  Well, good news this is totally possible and for free (*small print: Doesn’t include lab hardware and batteries not included). I’ve run a couple of webinar sessions over the past 18 months on setting up and running the EMC VNX and Celerra virtual storage appliance (VSA), and still regularly have people ask how they ge...

At VMworld 2012, VMware presented a Tech Preview of one of their latest ideas, which they termed “Distributed Storage”. So what exactly is this new technology? It is basically locally attached storage.How Will VMware’s Distributed Storage Change their Relationships?|The Virtualization Practice

As I have done since version 3.5, I’m charting the storage changes in VMware’s latest release of vSphere, 5.1. Detailed at VMworld but not released as of this writing, vSphere 5.1 is lauded for eliminating the “vTax” and bringing features like replication, a revised backup application, and shared-nothing vMotion. Unlike version 5, which included many new technical storage...

Storage Security is not only about Encryption, which is just one aspect of Storage Security requirements for the virtual and cloud environments. It is also about increasing defense in depth and knowledge of what is touching your storage environment. As well as providing security around those touch points and to a great extent auditing and protecting the data residing within the storage devices r...

Yesterday VMware announced that it will be supporting RAID 5 and 6 with their Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). With the release of vSphere 5, VMware also released their VSA, a shared storage solution for the SMB market. VMware VSA uses the local storage in each ESXi server, presents it to the VSA appliance which in [...] by Erik Scholten

In this video we’re going to cover the installation, configuration and usage of the VMware vCenter 5.0 Server Appliance (vCSA). The vCSA is a brand new production ready Virtual Appliance that allows you to stand up vCenter Server in literally a few minutes. Once you watch the video you’re going to be like, “Hey Rick, that was more than 5 minutes!”.  For that I do apolog...

For those of you who want to quickly test out the new VMware VSA (vSphere Storage Appliance) will notice that you can not just throw a few ESXi 5 hosts that have running virtual machines on them. If you try to proceed with the VSA installation, you will see an error message regarding the presence of virtual machines whether they are running or not.This can make it difficult to evaluate or test t...

While doing some workshops and presentations for some of our partners and customers one of the comments I usually here when discussing the vSphere Storage Appliance is “Why not just buy a cheap NAS device”? Well there are a couple of arguments: Support, many lower end cheap devices are not on the HCL Management, most storage devices require specific knowledge and can be difficult to...

We upgraded the ghettoDatacenter to vSphere 5 this weekend and one of the things I wanted to play with was the new VMware VSA (vSphere Storage Appliance). Since we only have a single host, running nested ESXi would be our only option and this would allow us to easily deploy three vESXi 5.0 hosts and vCenter to tinker with the new VMware VSA.One caveat in using vESXi hosts to test the VSA is duri...

It is 9am Pacific Time on Tuesday, July 12th 2011 and I sure hope you’re tuned into the vmware Mega Launch so greatly titled “Raising the Bar, Part V”. If you’re not watching the live broadcast, stop right here and tune into it by clicking this link, then come back and read this post. Spoiler alert… reading beyond this point talks about amazing updates and new featu...

In June of 2011 I visited China as EMC’s vSpecialists kicked off a program of technical workshops for VMware enthusiasts. We invited pre-sales teams from VMware, Cisco, and EMC to gather for presentations, discussions, and labs all focused on EMC and VMware products and how they work together. We call this group the vAmbassadors. And we are building communities like this throughout the ...

I am crazy heads down on a massive EMC World 2011 project right now. One bad side effect is I have not had time to keep up with the stuff I normally do on the side for EMC. This includes updates to the UBER VSAs (virtual storage appliances). I did get one *internal* one done recently but nothing for my community. Yet, almost a month ago, one of the teams behind the EMC VNX released a VSA for it....

I recently presented a webcast entitled “Install & Run the EMC Celerra Virtual Storage Appliance”.  This was great fun to present and was well attended with 165+ viewers.  In this webcast I covered the topic of installing, configuring and running an EMC Celerra Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) with background on how the Celerra hangs together and a demonstration of how easy&...

It’s the beginning of the month and you should know what that means…. new EMC virtualization focused webcasts! These awesome webcasts run every Thursday and offer some great content on what new and exciting things EMC is working on in terms of VMware integration as well as just their general efforts on cloud computing. This month there is even a special treat! I will be running a web...

I’ve been asked to present a webinar at this months upcoming ‘EMC Live Webcast Series’ and have decided that a session on installing, configuring and running the EMC Celerra Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) would be good fun and hopefully a topic of interest that many of you may enjoy tuning into.  It is scheduled to run on the following date: Thursday 3rd February 2011 8:00 a...

In this second part of the running the EMC Celerra Virtualized Storage Appliance (VSA) in your VMware vSphere lab series we will take a look at how to install the Celerra UBER VSA.  If you missed the first part of the series I would recommend heading back to the article here and have a read as this will provide you with useful knowledge on the Celerra storage appliance which will help i...

Recently, a number of us at NetApp were asked to share our thoughts around our expectations for 2011. The topics shared by thought leaders at NetApp from the likes of Val Bercovici to Jay Kidd ran the gamut from global economic conditions to ITaaS offerings to object-oriented storage architectures. As one might expect, the thoughts I shared were a bit more technical in nature and focused on the ...

First off, special thanks to Jason Boche for finding the root cause of this issue. Turns out in an OVA deployment the time syncing with ESX and VMware tools will cause problems with the SSL cert generation. Basically with some setups it will bounce time 5 hours forward *before* the SSL cert is generated. This is related to some time zone funkiness I have a fix for. Problem is this means that cer...

First off, special thanks to Jason Boche for finding the root cause of this issue. Turns out in an OVA deployment the time syncing with ESX and VMware tools will cause problems with the SSL cert generation. Basically with some setups it will bounce time 5 hours forward *before* the SSL cert is generated. This is related to some time zone funkiness I have a fix for. Problem is this means that cer...

Another bug and another fix. I can’t tell if I am getting better at finding bugs or worse at testing. Today I was able to replicate a weird issue that caused iSCSI LUNs to not show up with the ESXi 4.1 iSCSI adapter. Quick fix but if you are going to do iSCSI instead of NFS and are having issues, download the new VSA below: Workstation Version (MD5: a2136179d4d9544e4f8e3b43b7cc182e) vSphere Ve...

It came to my attention pretty quick that something was amiss with the last Celerra VSA UBER release. I heard strange stories of disks not adding and the OVA not deploying. Since this thing is drawing close on a couple thousand downloads some environmental, transfer, and operational bugs/errors will cause problems. But I finally nailed this down myself when I was doing my iSCSI testing. I had ru...