I just wanted to do a short post before the weekend, in vSAN 6.7 U3 there’s a great capacity overview screen. It shows a couple of things, first of all, it provides a simple bar that shows “data written”, “reserved space” and “free space”. The second section provides you the ability to figure out what happens to your capacity consumption if you would change the policy on all VMs. The third section gives you a nice breakdown of the capacity per category and a great circular diagram which shows immediately what kind of data is consuming your capacity. Very useful!
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VMworld Reveals: VMware Cloud Foundation (#HBI1432BUR)
At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about VMware Cloud Foundation, which was session HBI1432BUR. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. This session was presented by Mark Chuang and Jayanta K Dey. Please note that this is a summary of a session which is discussing the technology direction of the products, the discussed features may never be released, and this direction does not represent a commitment of any kind, and is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what is happening in the VMware Cloud Foundation space?
Jayanta kicked off with an introduction, and I believe most of you understand why we need to simplify IT, and if not, it is all about optimizing cost and improving speed/agility/time to market. This can only be achieved when you have a platform that caters for this, or basically a platform that enables you to focus on delivering services which are valuable to the business instead of focussing on the underlying infrastructure. This is where VMware Cloud Foundation comes in to play. It is a consistent and prescriptive full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure which can run any application.
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VMworld Reveals: vMotion innovations
At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about enhancements that will be introduced in the future to vMotion, the was session HBI1421BU. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. This session was presented by Arunachalam Ramanathan and Sreekanth Setty. Please note that this is a summary of a session which is discussing a Technical Preview, this feature/product may never be released, and this preview does not represent a commitment of any kind, and this feature (or it’s functionality) is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what can you expect for vMotion in the future.
The session starts with a brief history of vMotion and how we are capable today to vMotion VMs with 128 vCPUs and 6 TB of memory. The expectation is though that vSphere in the future will support 768 vCPUs and 24 TB of memory. Crazy configuration if you ask me, that is a proper Monster VM.
VMworld Reveals: VMware Cluster Memory (OCTO2746BU)
At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about VMware Cluster Memory, which was session OCTO2746BU. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. I first learned about VMware Cluster Memory at our VMware internal R&D conference in May this year, and immediately got excited about it. Please note that this is a summary of a session which is discussing a Technical Preview, this feature/product may never be released, and this preview does not represent a commitment of any kind, and this feature (or it’s functionality) is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what is Cluster Memory?
Well, it is exactly what you would expect it to be. Providing the ability to create a pool of cross-host memory resources. Now in order to do this, the first problem that needs to be looked at is the network. As mentioned in the session, the ratio of network to memory latency has lowered significantly. In 1997 the ratio was 1000 roughly, right now it is below 10. Meaning that network latency has lowered from milliseconds to low microseconds. Today to reach these low microseconds latencies technologies like RDMA will need to be considered. This change is very important for the Cluster Memory feature being discussed. Also very important, is the fact that RDMA is affordable, and this means it will be coming to a data center near you soon. A huge difference compared to years ago.
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VMworld Session Summary: #HCI1207BU HCI Management: Current and Future
I wasn’t able to sit in this session in person, but fortunately, the recording was out within a day. This session has been one of my favorite vSAN related sessions in the past couple of years, and it definitely is one of my favorite sessions this year. Again presented by Christian Dickmann and JunChi Zhang.
In this session, JunChi and Christian will go over some of VMware’s ideas around what HCI Management should look like in the future (HCI1207BU). Christian started by providing an overview of what HCI/vSAN is about today. Christian explained that the world of vSAN was relatively simple in the early years, but today the infrastructures where vSAN is being deployed, and the use-cases, are getting more complex. More and more customers are deploying in various locations and want to manage these solutions in a consistent and efficient way.
The topics which were covered in the session are Lifecycle Management, Intelligent Operations and Cloud Native Apps. JunChi started with Lifecycle Management. JunChi talked about what the vSAN team developed to make life easier when it comes to deploying vSphere. For instance, it is possible to specify in the vCenter Installer that vCenter needs to run on a new vSAN cluster and then the installer will create a single node vSAN cluster to ensure this is possible. Also, the Cluster Quickstart Guide was added, a great way to create and configure a vSphere cluster end to end. [Read more…] about VMworld Session Summary: #HCI1207BU HCI Management: Current and Future