Home > Blogs > Virtual Blocks > Tag Archives: SDS

Tag Archives: SDS

Software-Defined Storage in OpenStack

It’s time expand and showcase the strength of software-defined storage at the upcoming OpenStack Summit. Take a look at the abstract of the session I’m scheduled to participate as a speaker and lets’ get that bad boy vote in and into the schedule.

Getting the Bang for your Buck with Software-Defined Storage in OpenStack

OpenStack has become the standard infrastructure consumption layer for a variety of applications. These applications have different storage requirements and being able to provide a storage solution that matches these requirements is critical to ensure the adoption of OpenStack as the cloud platform of choice across a wide array of applications.

It is also important that enterprises that have made significant investments in storage gear are able to leverage those investments for their OpenStack deployments, while still having the choice of integrating newer storage technologies such as hyper-converged storage as they progress forward in their OpenStack journey.

This session will highlight how software-defined storage can enable enterprises to leverage their existing storage investments in building their OpenStack clouds and allow them to add newer technologies such as Virtual SAN as they go forward. The session will include

How to use policy driven storage to mix and match traditional SAN and newer hyper-converged storage for providing storage with different SLAs
Simplifying management and operation of a storage solution for OpenStack instances and volumes
Demo of a vSphere based software defined storage solution providing multi tier storage (SAN, Virtual SAN, NFS, etc) for OpenStack workloads.

Take a minute and please vote.

VOTE! for session here: Getting the Bang for your buck with Software-Defined Storage in OpenStack

– Enjoy

For future updates on Virtual SAN (VSAN), vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVol) and other Storage and Availability technologies, as well as vSphere Integrated OpenStack (VIO), and Cloud-Native Apps (CNA) be sure to follow me on Twitter: @PunchingClouds

VMware Virtual SAN Health Check Plug-in Now Available

The VMware Virtual SAN team is proud to announce the general availability of the new VMware Virtual SAN Health Check Plug-in.

The Health Check Plug-in was created to address one of the pain points many storage solution suffer from – hardware health and configuration – and VSAN is no different in that respect. The Health Check Plug-in will address this issue and in the same time maintain one of Virtual SAN’s core benefits – keeping things simple. The simplicity aspect comes into effect in two ways:

It’s a simple vCenter plug-in seamlessly integrating with the rest of the vCenter UI – maintaining the single pane of glass benefit
It provides clear and detailed warnings and alerts including suggested ways to solve issues when they appear

Virtual SAN Health Check Plug-in implements several checks including:

Hardware Compatibility – scans your VSAN cluster and detects components not on HCL. Also will make sure you have the right drivers and firmware
Networking Configuration – checks for potential hosts getting disconnected, cluster partitioning and other network related issues
Limits Health – makes sure the cluster stays operational in cases like a host failure
Storage Device Health – checks for disk capacity issues, congestion, metadata health and other potential device problems
Virtual Machines Objects health – checks for objects metadata health, and other potential object complications

Overview screen of Virtual SAN Health Check Plug-in:

In addition to the ongoing monitoring of the Virtual SAN 6 cluster health, the Health Check Plug-in enables a set of proactive tests like:

VM creation
Storage Performance
Multicast Performance

Check out this short demo video to see how the Health Check Plug-in helps overcome a networking problem:

The Health Check Plug-in is a free vCenter Plug-in that is downloadable under the drivers & tools tabs in the Virtual SAN download page. If you are not a Virtual SAN 6 customer, you can still try out the plug-in by downloading your free 60 days evaluation copy – www.vmware.com/go/try-vsan-dl-en

You can also try our hosted evaluation by going to the Virtual SAN 6 hands on lab – www.vmware.com/go/try-vsan-hol

Not all VVols are Created Equal : Hitachi Storage for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes

It is my pleasure today to again offer a post that has been written by an esteemed industry colleague and guest blogger. This post on VVol was written by Hitachi Data System’s Dinesh Singh. Dinesh is Solutions Marketing Manager with Hitachi Data Systems focused on virtualization and cloud solutions. Dinesh drives awareness and adoption of HDS storage solutions for VMware Server and EUC virtualization platforms. In this post Dinesh tells us about how Hitachi has approached the implementation of Virtual Volumes on their platform, and gives us some very nice detail about what can be done with HDS gear when coupled with Vvol.

—– Continue reading →

SDS – The Missing Link – Storage Automation for Application Service Catalogs

Automation technologies are a fundamental dependency to all aspects of the Software-Defined Data center. The use of automation technologies not only increases the overall productivity of the software-defined data center, but it can also accelerate the adoption of today’s modern operating models.

In recent years, a subset of the core pillars of the software-defined data center has experienced a great deal of improvements with the help of automation. The same can’t be said about storage. The lack management flexibility and capable automation frameworks have kept the storage infrastructures from delivering operational value and efficiencies similar to the ones available with the compute and network pillars.

VMware’s software-defined storage technologies and its storage policy-based management framework (SPBM) deliver the missing piece of the puzzle for storage infrastructure in the software-defined data center.

Continue reading →