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Perennially reservations weird behaviour whilst not configured correctly

Perennially reservations weird behaviour whilst not configured correctly

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Whilst using RDM disks in your environment you might notice long (even extremely long) boot time of your ESXi hosts. That’s because ESXi host uses a different technique to determine if Raw Device Mapped (RDM) LUNs are used for MSCS cluster devices, by introducing a configuration flag to mark each device as perennially reserved that is participating in an MSCS cluster. During the start of an ESXi host, the storage mid-layer attempts to discover all devices presented to an ESXi host…

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Infinio Accelerator – how it works?

Infinio Accelerator – how it works?

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In my last post about Infinio Accelerator we introduced product and basics about it. Now it is time to go more deep – how this server side cache is working ? Infinio’s cache inserts server RAM (and optionally, flash devices) transparently into the I/O stream. By dynamically populating server-side media with the hottest data, Infinio’s software reduces storage requirements to a small fraction of the workload size. Infinio is built on VMware’s vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) framework. This enables administrators…

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Mysterious Infinio – Product overview

Mysterious Infinio – Product overview

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Shared storage  performance and characteristics (iops,latency)  is crucial for overall  vSphere platform performance and users satisfaction. In the advent of ssd and memory cache solutions we have many options to chose in case storage acceleration (local ssd, array side ssd , server side ssd). Lets discuse further server side caching – act of caching data on the server. Data can be cached anywhere and at any point on the server that makes sense. It is common to cache commonly used…

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vSphere 6.5 – Stronger security with NFS 4.1

vSphere 6.5 – Stronger security with NFS 4.1

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NFS 4.1 is been supported since vSphere 6.0 and  but now we are looking into providing stronger security. In vSphere 6.5 we have better security  by providing strong cryptographic algorithms with Kerberos (AES). Also, IPV6 is supported but not with Kerberos and that is another area we are looking into along with supporting integrity checks. Aa we know vSphere 6 NFS client also does not support the more advanced encryption type know is AES. So lets take a look at…

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vSphere 6.5 – New scale limits for paths & LUNs

vSphere 6.5 – New scale limits for paths & LUNs

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In vSphere 6.5 VMware  doubled  the  current limits and continuously work on reaching new scale around this . Current limits (before 6.5) pose challenge as for example in some cases our customers have 8 paths to a LUN, in this configuration one can have max of 128 LUNs in a cluster. Also, many of the customers tend to have smaller size LUNs to segregate important data for easy backup and restore. This approach can also exhaust current LUN and Path…

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vSphere 6.5 – Automatic UNMAP

vSphere 6.5 – Automatic UNMAP

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In vSphere 6.5 VMware are looking into automating the UNMAP process, where VMFS  would track the deleted blocks and will be able to reclaim deleted space from the backend array in back ground. This background operation should make sure that there is a minimal storage I/O impact due to UNMAP operations. Just to remaind – UNMAP is a VAAI primitive using which we can reclaim dead or stranded space on thinly provisioned VMFS volume. Currently this can be initiated by…

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vSphere 6.5 – VMFS6 & 512e HDD support

vSphere 6.5 – VMFS6 & 512e HDD support

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vSphere 6.5 introduces a new VMFS 6 – but why we need new version You ask? –answer: to support new hdd type, and this  point  us to current storage market situation . Well because with  512bytes sector size HDD’s  vendors are hitting drive capacity limits. They can not go beyond a certain size without compromising the resilience and reliability (not the best option in case of our data).             To provide large capacity drives, Storage Industry is moving forward to Advance…

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Virtual SAN Storage performance tests in action

Virtual SAN Storage performance tests in action

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Virtual SAN provides the Storage Performance Proactive Tests which lets you to check parameters of your environment in an easy way. You just need few clicks to run a test. Well, we can see a lot of tests from nested labs in the Internet, however there are not so many real examples. I decided to share some results of such a real environment which consists 5 ESXi hosts. Each is equipped with 1x SSD Disk 1,92 TB and 5x HDD…

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