Yellow-Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Copyright © 2016

Sharing VMworld slides

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I know the VMworld team will share them as well over time, but I figured I would do the same thing through my blog. Here are two decks. First deck is the deck for “VMworld – sto7650 -Software defined storage @VMmware primer”. This session I presented with Lee Dilworth. I presented VSAN and Lee did the VVol and VAIO section. Second deck is the deck for “VMworld 2016 – INF8036 – enforcing a vSphere cluster design with PowerCLI automation” which I presented with Chris Wahl. I added the youtube video that the VMworld team shared to the second deck as well. Hope you folks find it useful.

download / comments for “sto7650 -Software defined storage @VMmware primer”

download / comments for “INF8036 – enforcing a vSphere cluster design with PowerCLI automation”

download / comments for “INF7875 – A day in the life of a VSAN IO.”

Want to watch a VMworld 2016 session?

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I had a long discussion with the VMworld team about this the past editions and I am happy to say that ALL sessions have been made available to the public straight after the event. VMware made all VMworld 2016 session available to the public. You can find them here: http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/2016.html. And also, if you want a more “limited” list, you can go for the top ranked sessions. You can find the top-10 session of each VMworld day here: http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/top-10-us.html.

There is one session I want to call out, I wasn’t able to do a live blog on it, mainly because it went deep, and it went deep fast. Ravi R. is one of the best deep tech speakers I have seen: INF8108 – Extreme Performance Series: vCenter Performance Deep Dive.

Thanks VMworld team for doing this. Time for some binge watching 🙂

Another major milestone, 5000 customers reached for VSAN!

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Yes, new quarterly results are out, and this is crazy, Yanbing (SVP/GM for Storage & Availability BU) dropped the news on twitter last night:

Yes that is correct, VSAN customer count grew with 1500 in just 1 quarter and the license bookings also grew > 200% Y0Y. Crazy numbers if you ask me, and some serious traction. Considering how well VxRail is doing I can only see this ramping up faster even. Just some quotes from last nights earnings call, you can find a transcript here and audio here if you are interested.

Pat Gelsinger:
Our hyper-converged license bookings, including VSAN and VxRail software, grew over 200% year-over-year. The new VxRail appliance we jointly developed with EMC was launched earlier this year and has enjoyed an impressive start, benefiting also from Dell’s decision to resell VxRail.

The rock stars of Q2 were NSX and VSAN and they were just fabulous

Yes, clearly the VxRail and the momentum that it is seeing was a piece of that. But a lot of the customer count was non-VxRail. So this product has now hit a point of inflection, as you suggest, that really was thrilling. And if I would call out one product in Q2 that just blew their numbers away, VSAN is it, and it was the rockstar of Q2 above all others. And what we’re seeing is that the product maturity, the channel momentum, I commented on the transactional channel before, and that really is well fit to VSAN. But also some of the enterprise use cases have clearly seen momentum, as well. And then we add to that the incremental benefits of VxRail that we jointly developed with EMC and Dell now reselling that VxRail product. It was also geographically balanced, as well. We saw VSAN growing across all of the geos, large customers, major wins, in healthcare, also mid market wins across different geos. So really, really excited about the VxRail, as well as the overall hyper-converged category for us and VSAN, the rockstar of Q2.

You know what, I will give away 5 “Essential Virtual SAN” books to 5 random people who leave a comment (and retweet / share this post on linkedin) to celebrate this great achievement. Please leave comment with your real name and correct email address so I can reply for your home address! I email winners Wednesday 19th of July end of day. [UPDATE: Winners have received an email from me, or will within the next 10 minutes]

Disk format version 4.0 update to 2.0 suggested

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I’ve seen some people reporting a strange message in the Virtual SAN UI. The UI states the following: Disk format version 4.0 (update to 2.0 suggested). This is what that looks like (stole the pic from VMTN, thanks Phillip.)

disk format version 4.0 update to 2.0 suggested

A bit strange considering you apparently have 4.0 why would you go to 2.0 then? Well you are actually on 2.0 and are supposed to go to 3.0. The reason this happens is because, most likely, not all hosts within you cluster are on the same version of Virtual SAN, or vCenter Server was not updated to the last version and ESXi has a higher version. So far I have seen this being reported when people upgrade to vSphere 6.0 Update 2. If you are upgrading, make sure to upgrade all hosts to ESXi 6.0 Update 2, but before you do, upgrade the vCenter Server to 6.0 Update 2 first!

Looking for the VROps VSAN Content Pack?

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I just noticed the link for the VROps VSAN Content Pack had changed and it isn’t easy to find through google either. Figured I would post it quickly so at least it is indexed and easier to find. Also including the LogInsight VSAN content pack link for your convenience: