John Nicholson

Recent Posts

Virtual SAN Performance Service and Performance Tools

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One of the exciting new features of Virtual SAN 6.2 is the new performance service. For quick troubleshooting of issues, or verification of performance it is a great and simple tool that can be turned on with a single checkbox.  This is an ESXi native performance monitoring system with API, as well as UI access. For Read more...

The Data Locality Discussion (Revisited Part 2)

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This is part 2 of this post. Part one can be found here. As we discussed in the previous blog post, and white papers networking latency is significantly lower than typical flash device latency, however there are some new exception cases that have come up as the Virtual SAN platform has been extended. Client Cache Read more...

The Data Locality Discussion (revisited Part 1)

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Back in 2014, Rawlinson Rivera made the case explaining how Virtual SAN took advantage of data locality with both temporal and spacial locality. He explains how intelligent prefetch algorithms save disk, and reduce latency. The Virtual SAN caching white paper goes into more detail on this. A key point in this paper was that Virtual SAN did Read more...

Scale up VMware Virtual SAN to scale down risk (Part 2)

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This is part 2 of the series. Click here for the first part. FTT=2 With Three Hosts Failing Now for our next example we wanted to look at what would happen if 3 hosts were lost simultaneously while using FTT=2 what would the impact be. As FTT=2 two policies require larger clusters by default (6 hosts Read more...

Scale up VMware Virtual SAN to scale down risk (Part 1)

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I was recently helping a customer design a highly resilient Virtual SAN deployment for tier 1 applications.  One thing that was clear was that the traditional rules for designing traditional Tier 1 modular storage arrays were not always applicable. Rule of scaling storage risk: consolidating more workloads to a storage system increases efficiency, but also Read more...
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Why Performance Consistency (and All Flash Virtual SAN) Matters.

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If an application is occasionally timing out, or experiencing inconstant performance shouldn’t we consider it “down or unavailable”?   Years ago I walked into a meeting with a customer and as the CIO walked in he asked his staff what their prime directive was. Not skipping a beat they all in unison stated “To provide a reliable Read more...

VMware Virtual SAN and SAS Expanders

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I’ve received a number of questions from customers about using SAS expanders for external, or internal storage. I would like to clear up any confusion and discuss what is supported (and more importantly why!) SAS expanders are supported only on VSAN ready nodes. Virtual SAN Ready Node is a validated server configuration in a tested, certified Read more...

VeeamLive – VSAN 6.2 What’s new!

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April 13 Wednesday 12:00 PM (UTC -05:00) John Nicholson live discussed VSAN 6.2 with Jose Mendoza and Shawn Lieu. In the session he went over the new features, how they impact design decisions, and how they work. They discussed how storage efficiency is enabling all flash to displace 10K and 15K RPM drives. They explained how new features Read more...

VSAN Error Handling – APD vs. PDL failures explained

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VMware Virtual SAN is a highly resilient storage platform.  Part of this resiliency is its distributed architecture that allows for rebuilds that leverage the full performance of the cluster to complete quickly. One interesting piece is how it intelligently handles different failure conditions. In some cases VSAN will delay the start of a rebuild to Read more...

What’s New – VMware Virtual SAN 6.2

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Today we are officially announcing the launch of VMware Virtual SAN 6.2. Virtual SAN is the foundation of VMware’s Hyper-Converged Software (HCS) that enables customers to experience industry leading  hyper-converged infrastructure. Customers are finding VMware HCS key in adopting a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) approach of streamlining and automating storage, networking and compute. Learn more about Read more...