Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Interview at the VMware theatre during VMworld

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I had the honour and pleasure to have been asked for a “rock star” interview at the VMware Theatre at VMworld in the Solutions Exchange. I am not a big fan of the use of the term “rock star” as I am not Dave Grohl or Eddie Vedder, just one of the geeks. Nevertheless it was a lot of fun to participate in this. The interview is more about me, how I got started, where I am today etc. If you are interested, it is a short 15 minute video…

There are two more I want to share, as I very much enjoyed watching them. Yanbing who is also part of our BU and was part of the VMworld keynote, and William “the automation robot/guru” Lam (no need to introduce him)… Enjoy watching, I think it is always nice to learn more about the person behind the character 🙂

Virtual SAN Stretched Clustering demo

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I posted about HA/DRS settings for VSAN Stretched Clustering yesterday and posted an intro to 6.1 and all new functionality which includes stretched clustering. As part of our VMworld session Rawlinson Rivera recorded a nice demo. We figured we should share it with the world, so I added the voice-over so at least it is clear what you are looking at and why certain things are configured in a specific way. I hope this demo shows how dead simple it is to configure VSAN stretched clustering, and how it handles a full site failure. Enjoy,

HA/DRS configuration with Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster environment

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This question is going to come sooner or later, how do I configure HA/DRS when I am running a Virtual SAN Stretched cluster configuration. I described some of the basics of Virtual SAN stretched clustering in a what’s new for 6.1 post already, if you haven’t read it then I urge you to do so first. There are a couple of key things to know, first of all the latency between data sites that can be tolerated is 5ms and to the witness location ~100ms.

If you look at the picture you below you can imagine that when a VM sits in Fault Domain A and is reading from Fault Domain B that it could incur a latency of 5ms for each read IO. From a performance perspective we would like to avoid this 5ms latency, so for stretched clusters we introduce the concept of read locality. We don’t have this in a non-stretched environment, as there the latency is microseconds and not miliseconds. Now this “read locality” is something we need to take in to consideration when we configure HA and DRS.

[Read more…] about HA/DRS configuration with Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster environment

VMworld Virtual SAN slidedecks up on slideshare

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I just posted the slidedecks that I presented at VMworld on Virtual SAN up on slideshare. The recording and the slides will probably at some point also show up on vmware.com but as I had many requests from people to share the material I figured I would do that straight after the event. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask.

Building a Stretched Cluster with Virtual SAN 6.1

Five common customer use cases for Virtual SAN