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 [...]

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 [...]

I just read Eric’s article about all the topics he covered around vSphere 5 over the last couple of weeks and as I just published the last article I had prepared I figured it would make sense to post something similar. (Great job by  the way Eric, I always enjoy reading your articles and watching your videos!) Although I did [...]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about Storage DRS (hereafter SDRS) interoperability and I mentioned that using SDRS with Auto-Tiering solutions should work… Now the truth is slightly different, however as I noticed some people  started throwing huge exclamation marks around SDRS I wanted to make a statement. Many have discussed this and made comments around why [...]

Storage has been my primary focus for the 5.0 launch. The question often asked when talking about the separate components is how it all fits together. Lets first list some of the new or enhanced features: VMFS-5 vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration aka VAAI vSphere Storage APIs – Storage Awareness aka VASA Profile-Driven Storage (VM Storage Profiles in the [...]

With vSphere 5.0 a brand new primitive has been introduced which is called Dead Space Reclamation as part of the overall thin provisioning primitive. Dead Space Reclamation is also sometimes referred to as unmap and it enables you to reclaim blocks of thin-provisioned LUNs by telling the array that specific blocks are obsolete, and yes that command used is the [...]

A lot has changed with vSphere 5.0 and so has one of the most under-appreciated “features”…. VMFS. VMFS has been substantially changed and I wanted to list some of the major changes and express my appreciation for the great work the VMFS team has done! VMFS-5 uses GPT instead of MBR VMFS-5 supports volumes up to 64TB This includes Pass-through [...]