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...

As per the article and confirmation from email from Broadcom to all their partners, there will be a minimum purchase for New VCF license purchase for new order starting 10th April 2025.  What will be your impact to customers like yourself? Basically for any new project, a minimal purchase of 72 cores license is required whether or not your compute workload is going to be lesser. This does not change the minimum purchase of 16 cores per CPU which still stand. While that is true, the above statement only applies to new purchase, if you are doing expansion or renewal of licenses, this does not change. So if you really just need a small setup using 3 servers each, taking a supported Dell PowerEdge R350 with vSphere 8.0U3 as per VMware site , with a minimum of 8 cores per CPU, you will need 24 cores license which will have a surplus of 48 cores (72-24). That is a bumper. For the above example, this will be wastage. However, as I mentioned, expansion and renewal are not impacted....

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...

As mentioned in this article , VMware has release vSphere Enterprise Plus edition offering and I think this is a great add-on having it got removed after end of perpetual offering. Though the Standard and Essential is good enough but there are many cases where vSphere Enterprise Plus is needed yet only made available in VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) which customer have to purchase just to use the vSphere Edition in it. Further on, the vSAN entitlement for VVF is also increased from 100GiB to 250GiB. This definitely make the usage of vSAN much more appealing in VVF. As I have create a calculator previously here , I have updated to include the 250GiB per core in VVF. I have not added any for vSphere Enterprise Plus since it can be used with the existing vSphere Standard since there is not special limitation for the new offering. Just to note the previous KB preferred to on the license entitlement for vSAN is however, not updated at the time of writing....

With the new SKU release in simplifying customer purchase, there are certain guideline in place in purchasing the different license SKU.  To help architects from partners and also end user, I have created this simple calculator for ease of sizing the license needed. Do note this is accurate at time of publishing and there might be changes. Here is the link to VMware License Calculator. Feel free to leave me any comments below. Update 13th Feb 2024 The minimum requirement for vSAN Add-on has been removed. There is no longer a 8TiB per CPU requirement as updated on KB .

After the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, there has been announcement on simplifying the way VMware software licensing will work. That was a very bold step to really help customers. There maybe lots of comments over it, but if you have never been into an architecture discussion and having to also coming out a licensing strategy, you might not appreciate this change. In additional, in totality, customer will find that the cost might just be much affordable than before. Contact your VMware Account Manager to find out more. So let's go back to the present. Existing customer who might have renewal ending and would definitely need to know how much license they would need to procure. The well known William Lam, definitely not leaving VM Admin challenges. He has created a PowerCLI script to help customer pull out those needed information to help existing brownfield customers forward.  Next to help understand what are the new criteria needed to purchase the new license, this is a kb ...

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...

You might not be aware as most customer do not have a datastore go beyond 2PB. Today we discover that if a datastore on vVOLs or vSAN which is more than 2PB, it will not be able to be use to create any workload. This is due to the PlaceVm API which limits it. You can refer to this kb . Though this will not affect many customers, VMware is committed to have this worked on perhaps to remove this limit. While that is at work, it is good to know and be aware when architecting.

If you happen to be learning how hyper-converge works and in this case, how VMware vSAN works, this is the post for you. Thanks to my team member, Kok Cheng Aw who shared this link . It is located under the TechZone section, Learn and Evaluate . If you choose under vSAN Demonstrations , you will locate the Infographic which is a bunch of animation that illustrate every single scenario on how vSAN works, how failure scenario happens, etc. This is really cool. In the past, we were to use heavy powerpoint animation to view such things (provided someone creates it). Now if all the information in TechZone and the Infographic at hand, you are now equip to take The VMware Specialist - vSAN certification. Wish I have that in the past, that makes life way easier to study and understand the technology. Hope this helps.

Right before VMworld, VMware has announcement some new releases. Two of which that has lots of new stuff to look forward to is vSphere and vSAN. Here I am going to list down all the resources that you can read or watch to find out more on what is new in both vSphere 7.0 Update 1 and vSAN 7.0 Update 1. vSphere 7.0 Update 1 Check out the announcement  here  and the youtube video  here . AMD SEV-ES Support in vSphere 7 vSphere With Tanzu - Networking with vSphere Distributed Switch vSphere 7 Update 1 – AMD SEV-ES   AMD SEV-ES Support in vSphere 7 ( video ) vSphere Clustering Service (vCLS) (updated) vSphere Lifecycle Manager Improvements (updated) Unprecedented Scalability (updated) As usual, with almost in every release, you see the maximum supported numbers goes up. However, one of the key supported on CPU security is from AMD on SEV-ES. Check out the article  here . vSAN 7.0 Update 1 Check out the announcement  here  and video . Duncan Epping have ...

It came to me that many people ain't very aware that vSAN has intelligence that is not just because it is a normal hyper convergent infrastructure infra (HCI) software but it is tightly integrated with vSphere to provide that intelligent. Often many of us get confused in what way vSAN is so intelligent? vSAN does come with Object Component State and there are four states namely: Active Active - Stale Absent Degrade So let go through each of them to have a complete understanding. A good article that summarize can be found here . Active State This is the simplest. vSAN indicates this that the object is accessible with no errors and it is accessible to function as it is. Active - Stale This happens when an object not in sync which means has data that is not updated. For illustration purposes, assuming a FTT=1 with RAID 1 is in place, the object should have a replica. Both copies of replica should be in sync and a sequence number is written to ensure both are up to...

With vSAN 6.2, the support for ROBO site been introduced.  There have been lots of questions regarding how do we license the witness in a more effective manner.  Some of the thought in using vSphere ROBO licenses, vSphere Essentials licenses, and even free ESXi hypervisor. Here this article is to explain the do-able methods that have not been very clear.  Before we start, check out the vSAN 6.5 Licensing Guide . First of all the common way to place the vSAN Witness are normally in a vSphere cluster.  So this cluster is already licensed.  It doesn't matter if its the lowest Essential Edition to Enterprise Plus Edition.  So if you like to run this even using a vSphere ROBO license, this can be done since ROBO is meant for a small site, not more than 25 VMs.  Do take note that, using vSphere ROBO, you will not be able to power on more than 25 VMs (assuming your license is 25VMs pack and has not been divided).  You cannot combine the license. ...

During the first day of VMworld 2016, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) was announced.  Some of us who are following what VMware has in its portfolio might be really confused.  I am just one of the few. So what is VMware Cloud Foundation?  Basically remember we used to have a platform known as EVO?  EVO Rail and EVO Rack.  EVO Rail has been deprecated and was only leaving the EVO Rack which was later rebrand as EVO SDDC.  VMware Cloud Foundation is the replacement for EVO SDDC. As of 1st Sept today, EVO SDDC is no longer available as stated here .  You can read more of VMware Cloud Foundation here .  The FAQ that clearly describe here . In a simple summary, EVO SDDC is been replaced by VMware Cloud Foundation and VCF is no longer limited to the few (actual 4) vendors exclusively, in fact customer can choose to use even a VSAN Ready Nodes with VCF and use the supported switches from Cisco or Arista making sure TOR and Spine are from the same vend...

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) ...

With the announcement of vSphere 6.0, comes Virtual SAN (VSAN) 6.0 the next release of VSAN since 5.5. This makes several improvement and I will be listing them here and do note of the differen ces as there are some improvement with changes to existing VSAN 5.5. To start clear, we need to know the terms right.  You will often hear Hybrid VSAN and All-Flash VSAN.  Hybrid is not new.  Since VSAN 5.5, it is always in Hybrid VSAN.  What it means it's a mixed of Flash or Solid State Harddisk (SSD) for cache and Magnetic Disk (MD) for persistent data. What about All-Flash, this is new in VSAN 6.0.  There will be no MD but make of all Flash/SSD for flash and SSD for persistent. source: VMware, Inc In VSAN 5.5, the cache read/write ratio was 70/30.  This is fixed and cannot be changed.  Of course in a VDI environment, this will be less favorable though it is using flash/SDD for cache since only 30% of the cache is used for write cache in a ...

With the days getting nearer to VMworld 2014, there are so much news from VMware.  First the acquisition of CloudVolume announced on 20th August 2014, now the release of the Virtual SAN (VSAN) Sizing Tool which everyone is having a great effort trying to find one or build one. Check out the release article on this and read about its limitation or requirement at the moment supported. You will be able to access the tool here . Just to note this is an initial release, so there might be one or two bugs you might encounter.  Do help by providing feedback by clicking on the feedback icon so we can have better tool by refine it further. Bugs found on 22nd Aug Initial test, the host count always stay at 14 irregardless of the parameters given. Issue has been resolved on 22nd Aug.

With the announcement of Horizon 6 on 9th April 2014, and the release of the availability of download marks another milestone from VMware in the End User Computing (EUC).  You will find the landing page for Horizon 6 (with View).  At the same time, the VMWare Hands-on-Lab (HOL) have release a new lab on Horizon 6 too! Let's first look at the available solutions that are in Horizon 6. Horizon View (VDI) The version is as similar to the launch Horizon View 6.0.  This is still the same Horizon View that using PCoIP to access a virtual desktop solution.  Typically used case are mostly found in office users, factory floors, retail or any place that is able to utilize a virtual desktop without the need of a powerful end point of offline access.  In this release, all the management servers can be support with the latest Windows 2012 R2 operating system.  The different in this release includes the End of Life (EOL) of Local Mode as a feature which was...

Yes the official announcement for VSAN has been made.  I was not able to catch as it was 2am Singapore time.  However you can watch the launch recorded video here .   You can read about the release notes here . Do note of a known error which some might encounter when enable VSAN without any disk group and after removal the error message remain persistent.  I admit many like myself so not read release notes. Error Message: "vsan datastore datastore1 in cluster **** in datacenter **** does not have capacity" Cormac Hogan has also did a summary of the launched which is pretty lots of supported feature beyond what was release in beta.  E.g. from 8 nodes to 32 nodes and from 120,000 IOPS to 2 Million IOPS.  Vicardo has done upa nice table here on comparison.  David Hill has a very long table of limit for Public Beta here which I made some correction in my table below: Description Public Beta GA Minimum nodes ...