John Nicholson

Recent Posts

Datastax, Cassandra and VMware vSAN powered HCI

posted

This blog was co-authored by Kathryn Erickson, Director of Strategic Partnerships at DataStax Enterprise   Cloud native applications can prove challenging to deploy, as the most efficient means of deployment may require building out a unique silo to handle the specific storage requirements of the platform. While it is true that you can force these Read more...
Update Manager

VMware Update Manager Firmware Updates in vSAN 6.7 U1

posted

vSAN HCI lifecycle management improvements Updates are an essential part of the day to day operations in a data center. VMware has been focused on making updates to a vSAN cluster as effortless as possible. vSAN 6.7 U1 centralizes all updating of vSAN and associated hardware through VMware Update Manager or VUM. This means that Read more...
UNMAP - "Because no ones wants to play storage Jenga(TM)"

VMware vSAN 6.7U1 Storage reclamation – TRIM/UNMAP

posted

VMware vSAN supports thin provisioning, which lets you, in the beginning, use just as much storage capacity as currently needed and then add the required amount of storage space at a later time. Using the vSAN thin provisioning feature, you can create virtual disks in a thin format. For a thin virtual disk, vSAN provisions Read more...
expansion costs

Cost of maintenance with HCI powered by vSAN

posted

Part of the reality of changing consumption models of infrastructure understands the cost model that existed before you moved, and is involved afterward. When looking for a car to commute there are a lot of ways to consume transportation. The cost of maintenance is an interesting one that multiple options can shift the cost, or Read more...

How Does vSAN-Powered HCI Speed Up Migrations?

posted

The Problem of Hidden Costs   Years ago I bought a (relatively) fancy car. for a reasonable price. It got great gas mileage and I got it at a great price. I quickly found out though that the car suffered from a few problems. This car required expensive parts when things broke. A lot broke Read more...

KB for vSAN Support Insight

posted

vSAN Support Insight is a next-generation platform for analytics of health, configuration, and performance telemetry. Its purpose is to help vSAN users maintain reliable and consistent computing, storage and network environment. New KB’s have come out outlining how to work with vSAN Support Insight. vSAN Analytics for Skyline – How to locate vCenter UUID (51121) The Read more...

Adaptive Resync in vSAN 6.7

posted

A key goal of vSAN is to deliver a reliable and consistent computing environment. One challenge to any storage system is making sure that when a device fails that the environment is brought back to full protection levels quickly. vSAN has some unique capabilities in that all free space is treated as “hot spare” capacity Read more...

What’s New with VMware vSAN 6.7

posted

Introducing vSAN 6.7 vSAN 6.7 is here! This release offers features and capabilities that enable improved performance, usability and consistency. Significant improvements to the management and monitoring tools are also matched by lower level performance and application consistency improvements. vSAN continues to see rapid adoption with more than 10,000 customers and growing. A 600 Million Read more...

vSAN Capacity View

posted

vSAN Capacity Views were introduced in 6.2 and provide insight into how capacity is being used. From the Cluster select —> Monitor —> vSAN —> Capacity to see the capacity views. From here you will find several panels of information related to the capacity.     First off is the Capacity Overview. This will show Read more...