"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
I posted a few months back about ESXi queue depth limits and how it affects performance. Just recently, Pure Storage announced our upcoming support for vSphere Virtual Volumes. So, this begs the question, what changes with VVols when it comes to queuing? In a certain view, a lot. But conceptually, actually very little. Let’s dig …
Continue reading “Queue Depth Limits and VVol Protocol Endpoints”
This is a blog post I have been waiting to write for quite some time. I cannot even remember exactly how long ago I saw Satyam Vaghani present on this as a concept at VMworld. Back when the concept of what is now called a protocol endpoint (more on that later) was called an I/O Demultiplexer. A mouthful …
Continue reading “Introducing vSphere Virtual Volumes on the FlashArray”
A customer pinged me the other day and said they could not see a volume on their ESXi host. Running ESXi version 6.5. All of the normal stuff checked out, but the volume was nowhere to be seen. What gives? Well it turned out to be the LUN ID was over 255 and ESXi couldn’t …
This is all very exciting for me, finally able to really start blogging about VVols in earnest. As you may or may not be aware we (Pure Storage) currently have our VVol implementation in beta. So I can finally start digging into some VVol work. Not going to get into implementation details just yet, but instead …
Another year, another VMworld! This year I have a few sessions that I have submitted that I would love to do this year, hopefully you agree and will vote for them. Plus some other sessions related to Pure Storage that you should take a look at.
A question recently came up on the Pure Storage Community Forum about VMFS capacity alerts that said, to paraphrase: “I am constantly getting capacity threshold (75%) alerts on my VMFS volumes but when I look at my FlashArray volume used capacity it is nowhere near that in used space. What can I do to make the …
Continue reading “VMFS Capacity Monitoring in a Data Reducing World”
Quick post. Recently I had the pleasure of, alongside Cormac Hogan being invited on to the Virtually Speaking Podcast hosted by Pete Flecha (Technical Marketing for VMware’s Storage and Availability products with a focus on VVols) and John Nicholson (Technical Marketing for VMware’s Storage and Availability products with a focus on vSAN) . Had a lot of fun, …
Continue reading “What’s New in vSphere 6.5 Storage vSpeaking Podcast”
Update: Please see this page for latest updates on best practices and relevant links. Quick post here. I have updated the Pure Storage FlashArray Best Practices Guide for VMware vSphere. Not a total overhaul but there are some changes to note. Updates include: New information for vSphere 6.0 This mostly focuses on what supports vSphere …
Continue reading “Updated VMware and Pure Storage Best Practices Guide”
UPDATE: In-guest UNMAP is now supported in a VM and sDelete and such is no longer required. Please refer to these posts: In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part I: Windows In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part II: Linux Direct Guest OS UNMAP in vSphere 6.0 Reclaiming “dirty” or “dead” space is a topic …
Continue reading “Reclaiming in-guest capacity with VMware and Pure Storage”
Phew another VMworld under my belt! Tons of fun and tons of work! Pure Storage had its largest presence ever at VMworld–we certainly painted Moscone orange in addition to unleashing an arsenal of nerf guns (4,500) upon the city. This post is meant to be more of a photo album of the week and what …