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VMware News, Views, and How-To's from vExpert Josh Townsend

This is an archive of my virtualization writing, 2008–2017. My current work is at joshuatownsend.com →

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Archives for August 2013

VMworld 2013 – Day 3 Recap

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By Josh Townsend

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Day 3 at VMworld 2013 did not include a keynote session, so there is not much in the way of new products or announcements to talk about in this update. Our engineers have been busy attending breakout sessions, soaking up knowledge on VMware NSX (network virtualization), storage enhancements in vSphere 5.5 (VSAN, vFlash, Virsto), vCloud Suite best practices for upgrades and operations, and what’s new and next in VMware’s end user computing vision.

We’ve also spent time interacting with vendors in the Solutions Exchange – some of which have been long standing Clearpath partners, like EMC, Cisco, Veeam, Zerto, and …read more

From: Clearpath Solutions Group Blog

Veeam v7’s New Features Explored at VMworld

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By Dave Cedrone

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Yesterday on day 2 of VMworld, I attended a deep dive session on Veeam Backup and Replication 7. With this announcement Veeam has included 2 major innovations, 7 new features, and 75 general enhancements. Veeam was already a top choice in my opinion for backing up your virtual environments. They are completely agentless, entirely virtualization focused, and they provide 26 restore options from a single backup.

The two major innovations they added are built-in WAN Acceleration, and the ability to backup from a storage snapshot. The built-in WAN acceleration will help customers better protect their data by reducing …read more

From: Clearpath Solutions Group Blog

VMworld 2013 – Day 2 Recap

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By Jason Shiplett

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Tuesday’s general session was focused on giving a little more of a deep-dive on a few big items – VMware NSX, VMware vCloud Automation Center (vCAC, pronounced vee-cake), VMware VSAN, and VMware vCloud Hybrid Service. Since we covered the high points on these yesterday, I’ll spare you the repetition. Here is what I thought were the highlights of the keynote:

  • Self-service deployment of Horizon View virtual desktops via the vCAC interface – The demo was a little light on details, but depending on how deep the integration goes, this is a very exciting proposition.
  • The WestJet customer video showing a real-world case …read moreFrom: Clearpath Solutions Group Blog

VMworld 2013 Day 1 Highlights

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By Jason Shiplett

Welcome to Clearpath’s coverage of VMworld 2013 in San Francisco. We have a team of engineers in attendance this week, where we’re learning about the latest and greatest releases from VMware as well as bulking up our knowledge of best practices, architecture improvements, and innovations in the industry. We’ll be providing additional detail over the coming weeks as additional information and documentation becomes available, and as our virtualization team works to upgrade the beta versions of these products in the Clearpath labs to the GA versions.

VMworld 2013 Day 1 Highlights

The Monday morning keynote at VMworld is typically the …read more

From: Clearpath Solutions Group Blog

64TB VMDKs? Yes we can.

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64tb VMDK Support in vSphere 5.5Here’s a tasty tidbit for you – in the just announced vSphere 5.5, we can now create 64TB VMDK files.  While much of vSphere 5.5 offers a 2x increase in configuration maximums over vSphere 5.1, the increase in VMDK size is a whopping 32x.  (It may actually be a bit less – I’m not sure if the -512B caveat comes into play on the virtual disk size for vSphere 5.5.  I didn’t think to test this out in the lab during my beta testing… the max size is actually 62.9TB as space is reserved in the containing VMFS for snapshots, metadata, etc.).

Now just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.  I wrote a post a couple months ago about large volume support in vSphere; the arguments I made in my previous post are still valid now.  Simple things, like this: a 64TB VMDK restoration would be a heck of a long process in the event of a disaster, and presents a pretty large single point of failure.

While the wisdom of configuring a 64TB VMDK is questionable for many workloads, I do think that the ability to create such a behemoth displays the ever increasing capabilities of the vmkernel and VMFS.  Hopefully this means that heap size limitations (https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004424) are a thing of the past (I haven’t done an in-place upgrade from 5.1 to 5.5, so I don’t know if the VMFS3.MinHeapSizeMB option is automatically adjusted to support more/larger VMDKs – something else I’ll have to test out when I get home from VMworld I guess).

Final thought – Larger than 2TB VMDKs will also allow us to stop using RDMs for large volume support.  This helps pave the way for pure NFS environments (RDMs are a block option) and opens the doors for vVol, vSAN, and vFlash support for all of our virtual (software defined) storage.