Plain Virtualization

There are lots of content available nowadays especially with the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, there are many on how to migrate off VMware and feature function comparison. One of the great content that is easily digestible from 2TekGuys . Below is a breakdown from the video on the features that was mentioned available on other hypervisors in comparison with VMware vSphere. I am not going to go into feature beyond mentioned in the video. Here are the list of features mentioned: Load Balancing : Moving using live migration of virtual machines (VMs) between hosts to due to contention. Backup : Support of backup from popular backup vendors or from hypervisor vendor themselves. Storage : Able to utilize external network storage/SAN or hypervisor own hyper-converged storage only. Live Migration : Ability to move VMs without any downtime between hosts. Having specialized on VMware vSphere for a long time in my career and been in a technical role from picking up VMware. I am always amazed by...

With many new start ups from storage arrays, converged, hyper-converged to software defined storage (SDS), many users starts to have lots of choice to make. Recently encountering many questions on which should they choose and which is better.  However there is no straight answer as there are just too many choices to choose from just like in a supermarket.  In the end, some may choose one that advertise the best and create the best reminder in your mind.  To be truth, you will not buy and replaced the rest, but rather some have a hybrid environment for some reasons which we will go through later. With several asks and questions, I like to give some guideline when deciding.  Here I will do my best to start with no bias towards any technology and this is my personal opinion and may not be the same with others. 1.  Ease of management: A big word often misused by marketing I would say.  Assess it and ask yourself do you have a team to manage different comp...

I came across some questions by people who were like me who got confused by the new terms of VADP and VAAI or vStorage API. What are these?  How are these related.  The letters do not tell you much so I am doing a explanation here. vStorage API are API also known as application programming interface which are a set of rules or codes given out for any one including vendors or principles to use them and integrate them to produce the function which is provided from the API. In this case, the API has two components: Data Protection Array Integration Do not get confused these two function different things and are meant for different components.  The only similarities is that they allow the function that the API allows to make use of the storage subsystem to lessen the load on the hosts. Lets talk about the two. vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) In layman terms. This is the API mainly used by backup principles to integrate this function into their software...

In the view of the new feature in vSphere 5 on VAAI, the reclaim of space from thin provision datastore whereby a file is deleted from datastore or when a storage vmotion is performed or even a snapshot consolidation.  Performance issue may arise and create error when the above are performed. Details can be found in this blog: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/09/vaai-thin-provisioning-block-reclaimunmap-issue.html Knowledge base: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2007427

VMware Blogs actually have a 4 parts series on the Storage features in vSphere 5. Was reading up the VAAI thin provisioning alert and reclaimation and the differences on VMFS volumes and guest portion have me came across this article by Hitachi. It explain in very simple terms which I felt was good to understand.  Those who are not as storage trained like myself would appreciate this portion. Just to recap where we are in the lifecycle of VAAI, vSphere 4.1 introduced three primitives: XCOPY, ATS (Atomic Test & Set) & WRITESAME. vSphere 5.0 adds two new primitives: Thin Provisioning-STUN (TP-STUN) and UNMAP, bringing us to a total of 5 primitives. Here is more detail about these new primitives and what they mean to the VMware & storage admins: Thin Provisioning STUN – This is an Error Code to report “Out of Space” for a thin volume. If a storage array supports this SCSI command, then when a datastore reaches 100% capacity and any of the VM’s requir...