Cormac Hogan

Cormac Hogan is a Senior Staff Engineer in the Office of the CTO in the Storage and Availability Business Unit (SABU) at VMware. He has been with VMware since April 2005 and has previously held roles in VMware’s Technical Marketing and Technical Support organizations. He has written a number of storage related white papers and have given numerous presentations on storage best practices and vSphere storage features. He is also the co-author of the “Essential Virtual SAN” book published by VMware Press.

Recent Posts

Virtual SAN – Sizing Considerations

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UPDATE: Now that Virtual SAN is out of beta and generally available, there is updated guidance around sizing.  The information written below was written during the beta, and has now been superceded by the new guidance.  Please read this blog post for the latest recommendations or directly download the GA edition of the Virtual SAN Read more...

Virtual SAN Beta Refresh Updates

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There is a new beta release of Virtual SAN (VSAN) available today for those of you participating in the beta. You can download the new bits of the beta refresh by clicking here (you will need a valid MyVMware login to access it). This post covers a number of areas around the beta refresh. It Read more...

Virtual SAN – Maintenance Mode Monitoring

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Over the past couple of days, I’ve been looking at the behavior of Virtual SAN (VSAN) from the context of placing a host into maintenance mode. With VSAN enabled on the cluster, the administrator is given a number of options to choose from: Ensure accessibility Full data migration No data migration The thing with VSAN Read more...

What’s new in vSphere 5.5 – the video!

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Hi all, Now that VMworld 2013 is over (both America & Europe), I noticed that a bunch of the break out sessions are now up on YouTube. Kyle Gleed (@VMwareESXi) and I delivered a 1 hour presentation on “what’s new in vSphere 5.5”, including ESXi, vCenter and Storage. You can watch the whole thing here. Read more...

Virtual SAN & Disk Groups

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[Updated for VSAN beta refresh – November 2013] I had a number of questions and queries on VSAN over the past week at VMworld 2013 in Europe. Many of these questions related to the role of disk groups. I will try to answer a number of them in this post. Read more...

Virtual SAN & support for Horizon View Desktops

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We had an interesting announcement here at VMworld EMEA yesterday, where the audience was told that Horizon View version 5.3 will support and have interoperability with Virtual SAN (VSAN). This was a timely announcement as our performance engineering team just released some very impressive VDI numbers using VMware’s new Virtual SAN storage system and View Read more...

New Virtual SAN (VSAN) white paper available

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A new Virtual SAN (VSAN) white paper is now available. VSAN is a new storage solution from VMware that is fully integrated with vSphere. The paper looks at all aspects of the new VSAN architecture, including what the requirements are, the converged storage and compute aspects, the hybrid nature of using SSD & HDD, and Read more...

VSAN and Storage Controllers

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UPDATE: Now that Virtual SAN is officially released, the hardware compatibility list has been updated.  This list has changed considerably since the Beta of VSAN, and some devices are no longer supported.  For the latest and most up-to-date information, please check the VMware Compatibility Guide for Virtual SAN. There have been numerous questions around supported storage Read more...

A list of VSAN references – from VMware bloggers

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A lot of folks have been looking for VSAN reference materials now that vSphere 5.5 is available and the VSAN beta can commence in earnest. Many VMware employees, who are also bloggers, have put together quite a bit of information to get you well and truly on your way to a successful VSAN deployment. This Read more...

Virtual SAN (VSAN) videos now available

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A selection of VSAN videos are now available on the VMwareTV YouTube Channel. These videos cover basic install, VM Storage Policy creation and modifying, as well as how VSAN handles various failure conditions (including interop with vSphere HA). Check them out here: Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following Read more...