VMware Storage and Software-defined Storage (SDS) Solutions Blog Posts Oregon State University, a public institution with more than 26,000 students and growing VDI workloads wanted a high performance storage tier for their VDI environment. However, they wanted the solution to be up and running before the school summer session began, along with being easy to operate and scale on an on-going basis, without requiring large upfront investments. Continue reading Welcome to the next installment of our vSphere PowerCLI 5.8 walkthrough series of the new cmdlets for vSphere Storage Policy Based Management. Introduction to vSphere Storage Policies Creating vSphere Storage PoliciesAssociating vSphere Storage Policies In this article we will take the next step and illustrate how to leverage vSphere Storage Policies to enhance the provisioning of New VMs. PowerCLI cmdlets referenced in this blog article: New-VM Get-SpbmCompatibleStorage Get-SpbmEntityConfigurationSet-SpbmEntityConfiguration Using the vSphere Web ClientUsing PowerCLI Continue reading Continue reading
Review: VMware Virtual SAN turns storage inside-out Convergence of compute and storage is all the rage in the virtualization market these days. You see it in Microsoft's Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V and Storage Spaces. You see it in third-party platforms such as Nutanix. And you see it in VMware's vSphere flagship with the addition of Virtual SAN, a new capability built into the ESXi hypervisor that turns the direct-attached storage in vSphere cluster nodes into highly available, high-performance shared storage. The goals behind Virtual SAN, or VSAN, are both to lower overall storage costs and to eliminate the I/O latencies associated with networked storage. [ Virtualization showdown: Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VSAN requires a minimum of three vSphere nodes to form a clustered data store. VSAN, at least in its initial release, targets a short list of use cases. For this review, I was provided with hardware from Supermicro and Lenovo.
VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) for Shared Storage End of Availability VMware is announcing the End of Availability of all vSphere Storage Appliance versions, effective April 1, 2014. After this date you will no longer be able to purchase this product. All support and maintenance for vSphere Storage Appliance 5.5 will be unaffected and will continue to follow the Enterprise Infrastructure Support Policy. The End of General Support life date for customers with vSphere Storage Appliance 5.5 remains September 19, 2018. Support contracts can be renewed beyond End of Availbaility until End of General Support. Customers interested in moving to a new VMware software-defined storage solution may elect to upgrade to VMware Virtual SAN.
vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) for Shared Storage End of Availability VMware is announcing the End of Availability of all vSphere Storage Appliance versions, effective April 1, 2014. After this date you will no longer be able to purchase this product. All support and maintenance for vSphere Storage Appliance 5.5 will be unaffected and will continue to follow the Enterprise Infrastructure Support Policy. The End of General Support life date for customers with vSphere Storage Appliance 5.5 remains September 19, 2018. Support contracts can be renewed beyond End of Availbaility until End of General Support. Customers interested in moving to a new VMware software-defined storage solution may elect to upgrade to VMware Virtual SAN.
VMware vSphere Best Practices - VMwaremine - Mine of knowledge about virtualization VMware tools for nested ESXi If you have nested ESXi running on your homelab environment this is something which you should look at. VMware tools for nested ESXi – very cool flings by VMware labs it does work like on any other guest operating system (Linux, Windows). read more OpenSSL heartbleed bug – VMware products Most probably you are aware about recent finding by The bug was independently discovered by security firm Codenomicon and a Google Security engineer. Sponsor News 04/2014 vCAC 6.0 most annoying installation error During my POC on vCAC I had to struggle with different type of issues but he most annoying one was during IaaS component installation. vCO workflow – change vCPU count Recently I started to develop\build my own vCenter Orchestrator workflows. 2014 top VMware & virtualization blog voting results are out vCAC 6 series – Part 11 – Create Blueprint vSphere 5.5 U1 released with vSAN 1.0 support vCAC 6 series – Part 10 – Prepare for provisioning vSAN 1.0 Announcement
Storage Resource Management Time and time again, I hear customers ask for a tool that provides a view into storage relationships in order to analyze configurations and capacity growth. They want insight into the bottlenecks that can lie in many possible places between the spindle and the application. But the question we need to ask ourselves is this: does end-to-end monitoring and analysis of storage through historical or real-time metrics for applications, hosts, switches, and arrays constitute “storage resource management”? Storage “Best Practices” For a moment, let’s consider a couple of fundamental characteristics for storage, capacity and performance. Total storage amount and the total amount of IOPs are the defining factors in the storage world. There’s a Disconnect Everything always links back to the applications regardless of the preparation and insight we have, and we are always striving to meet some sort of SLA. Understand App Demand & Storage Supply within the Context of a Shared Environment
Converged Storage for VMware Imagine what you can achieve by combining the power of VMware vSphere with storage platforms designed to eliminate the challenges of server and client virtualization. HP’s next generation of Converged Storage solutions are designed to enhance the benefits of VMware vSphere, VMware View, and VMware vCloud Solutions. With HP storage supporting your VMware deployments, you are able to: Optimize VM density, availability and business continuity Simplify provisioning and management with less storage and vSphere complexity Save on storage by increasing capacity utilization and efficiency HP Converged Storage for VMware Environments HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage—delivers best-in-class, hardware-assisted integration with VMware vSphere along with guarantees to double your VM density and cut your capacity requirements in half. HP StoreOnce Backup—reduces backup data in vSphere environments by up to 20x by eliminating duplicated data. HP VirtualSystem Solution brief (PDF 274 KB) Increasing VM density
What is virtual storage? - Definition from WhatIs.com Virtual storage is the pooling of physical storage from multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage device that is managed from a central console. By submitting your email address, you agree to receive emails regarding relevant topic offers from TechTarget and its partners. You can withdraw your consent at any time. Contact TechTarget at 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA. You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy. Storage virtualization software converts a server, typically an X86 server, into a storage controller and the storage inside the server into the storage system. Enterprise virtual storage products include Hitachi Data Systems’ Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and NetApp V-Series. See also: storage virtualization, software-defined storage, storage hypervisor
VMware Storage Integration & Top Storage Vendors Research done in collaboration with Stuart Miniman and Nick Allen Introduction In April 2011 Wikibon ran a survey looking at the area of storage and VMware. The results showed that EMC and NetApp had a clear lead in the number of respondents that selected them as the best VMware storage and as the primary VMware storage vendor. Wikibon has further analyzed the results of the survey, including a detailed analysis of the degree of integration. Figure 1 – Relative Positioning of VMware Storage Integration by VendorSource: Wikibon Survey April 2011, n=361, and detailed analysis of vendor implementations. Wikibon believes that practitioners can use the methodology in this report to help position the importance of integration features for their own VMware storage decisions and to help decide which vendors to include in RFPs. Vendors and Storage Assessed Wikibon looked at the major storage offerings from the six (6) largest storage vendors. Rating Importance of Integration Features Conclusions