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Category: vSAN

vSAN and vSphere compatibility differences

vSAN and vSphere compatibility differences

In my work, I am often doing updates for customers that are not using VMware Cloud Foundation. And when doing these updates, it is very important to be aware of the differences in compatibility between vSphere and vSAN. They both use the drivers that are installed by the update process, from Update Manager or Lifecycle Manager, but they maintain different Hardware Compatibility Lists. When I did an update of vSphere for a customer, deploying the latest updates from vSphere, I…

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New versions of vSphere, vSAN and VCF. Small update, big changes!

New versions of vSphere, vSAN and VCF. Small update, big changes!

On September 15th, VMware has announced new versions of vSphere, vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and I must say that I am pretty impressed with the functionality changes. In a quick overview, the main changes are: vSphere 7.0U1 vSphere with integrated Kubernetes Melvin has grown Cluster size increase EVC for Graphics LifeCycle Manager enhancements vCenter Connect vSphere Ideas vSAN 7.0U1 HCI Mesh File Servics: SMB support! Shared Witness vLCM Enhancements VCF 4.1 NSX-T 3.0.1 VCF Remote Clusters Parellel NSX-T…

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HCI Benching the lab

HCI Benching the lab

Just a small tidbit. I have built the vSphere/vSAN part of the lab and am curious as to what the performance is, so I’ll use HCIBench for that: https://flings.vmware.com/hcibench. Deploying it is pretty straightforward, it’s an OVA: After that (and powering on), the configuration is done through the web-interface: Previous times I ran HCIBench at customers, I used VDBench as the bench-marking tool. In this version FIO is available, so I’ll give that a go. The “Clear Read/Write Cache Before…

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Building the lab – vSphere and vSAN

Building the lab – vSphere and vSAN

After creating the NSX Managers (Local and Global, see https://my-sddc.net/nsx-t-global-manager-installation-and-initial-setup), and receiving the goods I ordered for the nested hosts, it is time to begin building the basics for the new lab. I have the availability of one HP DL380p Gen8, with two processors and 384 GB of memory. Two 450 GB 10K SAS disks for the basic virtual machines (vCenter, NSX-Manager and such) and I added two time three SSD’s. The idea behind this, is that I will create…

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vSAN 7.0: Ready for Modern Applications and more

vSAN 7.0: Ready for Modern Applications and more

With the new version of vSphere (also see https://my-sddc.net/?p=833), we can also look forward to a new version of vSAN. And with vSphere, this also brings along a lot of new and improved functionality. Most importantly, vSAN is aligned with the other VMware portfolio to support the Modern Applications. With vSAN we now can use “Cloud Native Storage” (CNS), to natively support Kubernetes. The architecture around this looks like: Through this CNS it is possible to treat storage used by…

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