Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vstorage

Pluggable Storage Architecture, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

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The next version of ESX has a totally different architecture for storage. The new architecture is called “Pluggable Storage Architecture”. For my own understanding I wanted to write down how this actually works and what all the different abbreviations/acronyms mean:

  • PSA = Pluggable Storage Architecture
  • NMP = Native Multipathing
  • MPP = Multipathing Plugin
  • PSP = Path Selection Plugin
  • SATP = Storage Array Type Plugin

At the top level we have “Pluggable Storage Architecture”. This is just the name of the new concept, but it’s a well chosen name cause that’s what it is… a new storage architecture that uses plugins. Let’s start with the native VMware plugins. [Read more…] about Pluggable Storage Architecture, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

VMware Communities Roundtable podcast tonight!

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I’m really looking forward to the podcast tonight. We’ve got Chad Sakac from EMC joining in to elaborate on topics like:

  • What VMware, EMC and Cisco are doing together around the Next Generation Datacenter
  • What’s coming in vStorage
  • Reference Architectures for Tier 1 applications like Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint
  • What we’re seeing around Disaster Recovery for VMware
Most of you probably discovered Chad’s blog by now, if you didn’t check it out. Especially his post on vStorage gives you an idea what Chad and his team are working on. But also the more technical posts like this one on VMFS Resignaturing contain really valuable info.
Anyway join us on the podcast. Wednesdays noon PST / 3pm EST / 8pm GMT. You can find live Connect info here. (For those like me having trouble converting time to your time zone click here.)

Future version of VCB not an installable anymore

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VMware just dropped the news that the future version of VCB will not be an installable anymore. VCB will be an API. This will save you that additional (proxy) host that it will normally cost you. This probably also means that software vendors can take the full advantage of their own unique abilities like deduplication, direct restore into a VM… Agentless backups in a decent way. I’ve always thought that VCB was underestimated by a lot of people, but I guess I did know why. This should solve most of the problems people were facing with the integration modules and scripting.