I was playing around in my lab with NFS datastores today. I wanted to fail-over a replicated NFS datastore without the need to re-register the virtual machines running on them. I had mounted the NFS datastore using the IP address and as that is used to create the UUID it was obvious that it wouldn’t work. I figured there should [...]

My colleague Cormac posted an article about this already, but I figured it was important enough to rehash some of content. As many of you have experienced there was an issue with ESXi 5.0 in iSCSI environments. Booting would take a fair amount of time due to the increase of the amount of retries in the case creating a connection [...]

I started digging in to this yesterday when I had a comment on my Metro Cluster article. I found it very challenging to get through the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster HCL details and decided to write an article about it which might help you as well when designing or implementing a solution like this. First things first, here are the [...]

Before we dive in to it, lets spell out the actual name of the feature “Swap to host cache”. Remember that, swap to host cache! I’ve seen multiple people mentioning this feature and saw William posting a hack on how to fool vSphere (feature is part of vSphere 5 to be clear) into thinking it has access to SSD disks [...]

Back in March I wrote about this new and interesting storage vendor called Tintri which had just released a new NAS appliance called VMstore. I wrote about their level of integration and the fact that their NAS appliance is virtual machine aware and allows you to define performance policies per virtual machine. I am not going to rehash the complete [...]

I was just reading up and noticed an article about Nutanix. Nutanix is a “new” company which just came out of stealth mode and offers a datacenter in a box type of solution. With that meaning that they have a solution which provides shared storage and compute resources in a single 2u chassis. This 2u chassis can hold up to [...]

This week I received a question about Storage DRS. The question was if it was possible to have a VM with multiple disks in different datastore clusters? It’s not uncommon to have set ups like these so I figured it would be smart to document it. The answer is yes that is supported. You can create a virtual machine with [...]