Plain Virtualization

Looking at the trend of data referencing from here . We can see that data has been growing phenomenally. In actual fact, looking at the trend, the boom started in 2020 and has not stop ever since. Source: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/data-generated-per-day  In today infrastructure, we have two major solutions for data management. One is our traditional storage array and the other is HyperConverge Infrastructure (HCI). The latter only started picking up in early 2011 where some of the known names such as pivot3 and the major players after such as Nutanix and VMware vSAN which exist most commonly in most data center infrastructure. As data volume increases and the the adoption of AI, capacity and performance for data management become a crucial requirement. Taking example from the like on virtualization, you can have all the compute resources for your virtual machine, but if your workload data IO and capacity cannot be serve, the bottleneck still exist.  In the wor...

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...

If you have not heard of Dell VxRaill appliance, you might just want to check it out. Just giving a short summary, this is a purposeful engineered appliance between Dell and VMware. Optimized to run vSphere, and vSAN which is VMware hypervisor and HCI solution. It comes with its own lifecycle management deeply integrated with VMware vCenter Server for lifecycle management as well. Such a beast of all appliance definitely comes with some design and best practices which will help you get the most out of it. So the right guy who have it al written down would be, Victor Wu . Victor is no stranger to Dell and VMware. He has been a great advocate on the two and more. This is not his first and won't be his last book I suppose.  I was fortunate to have received a copy from him. Definitely worth a read if you are trying to get updated and understand more why some of the design and best practice. Some of it could also be used on other systems.  Do check it out  Dell VxRail System D...