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...

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...