Plain Virtualization

VMware vSAN is a Hyper-Converge Infrastructure solution which is part of VMware Cloud Foundation  (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) bundling.  While VMware vSAN helps customer to achieve a SAN like storage pooling using local HDD on each server together, it is still limited on features it encompasses in comparison to a physical SAN. This is where NetApp ONTAP Select which will complement the missing gap. ONTAP Select is the virtual appliance of the well known ONTAP that runs on all NetApp Unified Storage appliance. One of the major function that ONTAP Select brings to vSAN is on Data management and Protection. This is very useful for protection specific applications especially application aware application by ONTAP Select. Some of the enterprise applications supported can be found here . A detailed kb from Broadcom can be found  here . With ONTAP Select, these applications that are supported can be protected via SnapMirror which can provide an application consiste...

One of the many documents that we always refer to for vSphere is the configuration maximum. Back in the days, I still remember VCP was tested on it. Though this document is good to refer to, there are other components such as NSX, vRealize Operations, etc. that have a certain maximum that we would search high and low for it. VMware has released a site that contains all these maximums information. Though this is not complete, this will be the single source of truth when you find that documentation might not be updated. Not only do you get to see the maximum, but you can also even compare previous versions limits. It is very easy to use, Just 1) Choose a product, 2) Select the version, 3) What type of maximum, you can choose more than one, 4) To display the limits. Now head over to try it out.

Coming a new year VMware started to have some new changes to either pricing or bundling changes to existing Suites or Bundle. The most changes and the introduction of some new bundling last year where vRealize Suite was introduced with vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) and upgrade with vRealize Operation LogInsight (vROI) add-on. This year there are some streamlining of the bundle and pricing changes.  I will leave the price aside as this can be found easily or from your partners.  I will go through the changes starting from vSphere to vSOM to vROI to vCloud Suite and vRealize Suite.  Also new packaging for Virtual SAN (VSAN). All changes is starting from 1st March 2016. vCenter Bundle with vRealize Log Insight for logging to 25 devices (vCenter server and/or hosts logs only) vSphere 6.x End of Availability for vSphere Enterprise edition. All editions namely; Essential Plus, Standard and Enterprise Plus. vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) ...

Following the announcement on 2nd Feb 2015 on the new vSphere 6 which is part of vSphere with Operations Management and vCloud Suite 6, today is the general availability (GA) for the binary. These includes but not limited to vSphere 6 (vCenter Server 6, ESXi 6), vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) 6, VMware Data Protection (VDP) 6, vSphere Replication (vR) 6, Virtual SAN (VSAN) 6, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 6, vRealize Automation (vRA) 6.2.1, vRealize Business (vRB) 6.1.0 and also not new in today release vRealize Operations (vROps) 6.0.1. Head over to the vCloud Suite download site to get those bits. Also do check out the product documentation site on the changes from release notes. In conjuction, the release of Horizon 6.1 also announced and made available.  In this release, Horizon 6 Enterprise now includes App Volumes. Get the binary here and product document here .  Also refer to the vSphere Update Center for more information on upgrading. Need some help from co...

References: VMware Compatiblity Guide VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes Business Applications on VMware Platform I have been asked many times if this hardware will support that hardware or does this solution support the other solution?  What are the databases supported?  Which storage support VMware Site Recovery Manager? It's pretty easy to find this out but if you do not know how to you might end up goggling and find yourself with lots of links but not very closed to your expected results.  Reason is these are all based on search engines so unless someone posted that on the internet else it would be hard to come by. Below is a video on how you can easily navigate on VMware website to look for the compatibility matrix that you are looking for.  Do not that as not all hardware are send in for certification, the newest and greatest might not be listed in the database.  For that, you will need to check back with the respective hardware vendor. ...

References vSphere Metro Storage Cluster white paper released! Stretched Clusters and VMware vCenterTM Site Recovery Manager VMware KB: VMware support with NetApp MetroCluster VMware KB: vSphere 5.x support with NetApp MetroCluster Been encountering a lot of questions on Metro clustering on VMware as well as active-active data center setup.  I would like to bring this out to help anyone who is consider doing a metro cluster to understand what are the main requirements and the cost involved as well as the scenario cases which need to be understand before you make that decision. Many wanted to do a stretch cluster mainly to meet a active-active data center setup.  Some wanted to have a a easier disaster recovery. I must clarify some misconception here.  Metro clustering is Downtime Avoidance (DA) .  It is not disaster recovery (DR).  DR has a downtime to recover.  Metro clustering is a active active setup for near zero setup if storage is synchr...

A customer got to me on the following during their installation.  They were trying to configure SRM 4.x to their storage and encounter the below error: Before starting the implementation of SRM, it is always recommended to check out the storage matrix of the management software, firmware and the adapter version required.  This can be done so from here . Some Site Recovery Adapters require a specific version of Java to be installed.  There is a KB on the requirement of JRE which have been stated.  So make sure Java is installed on the SRM server.  Check with the Storage vendor on the required Java version for this case.  They might be dependency for different version of management software used. Some Array vendors do not include the path to the perl binary.  To resolved this issue, you can point the path to SRM installation path from this KB . A collection of common issues you can refer to from the VMware Communities post . As f...