There is a saying in our industry that Microsoft always get their products right on the third attempt…and while this has been less and less the case of late (Hyper-V 2012 didn’t exactly deliver) it is more or less an accurate statement. Having been part of the beta and early access blogger sessions for VSAN […] Read More
Preserving VSAN + DELL PERC Critical Drivers after ESXi 6.0 CBT Update
Last week VMware released a patch to fix another issue with Change Block Tracking (CBT) which took the ESXi 6.0 Update 1 Build to 3247720. The update bundle contains a number of updates to the esx-base including the resolution of the CBT issue. This patch updates the esx-base VIB to resolve an issue that occurs […] Read More
Dell PowerEdge FX2: VSAN Disk Configuration Steps
When you get your new DELL FX2s out of the box and powered on for the first time you will notice that the disk configuration has not been setup with VSAN in mind…If you where to log into ESXi on the blades in SLOT1a and 1c you would see that each host will have each SAS […] Read More
VSAN + DELL PERC: Important Driver and Firmware Updates
I’m currently going through and documenting the build process for our VSAN Management Clusters and one of the first steps I noted down was to double check that the I/O Controllers where compatible as per the VSAN HCL. As I am using the DELL FX2s I checked to ensure that there where no issues with the FD332-PERC […] Read More
Dell PowerEdge FX2: CMC Configuration Gotchya
Back in September I wrote an introductory post (If you haven’t read that post click here) on the DELL PowerEdge FX2 HCI hardware and why we had selected it for our VSAN Management platform. After a busy two months consisting of a VMworld, vForumAU and VeeamOn it’s finally time to put start working towards putting these babies into production. […] Read More
VSAN for Service Providers
Since VMworld in San Francisco, VMware have been on a tear backing up all the VSAN related announcements at the show by starting to push a stronger message around the improvements in the latest VSAN release. Cormac Hogan and Rawlinson Rivera have published articles while Duncan Epping has also released a number of articles around VSAN since […] Read More
First Look: Dell PowerEdge FX2 Converged Platform
For the last six months or so I’ve been on the look out for server and storage hardware to satisfy the requirement for new Management Clusters across our Zettagrid vCloud Zones… After a fairly exhaustive discovery and research stage the Dell PowerEdge FX2 dropped at the right time to make the newly updated converged architecture […] Read More
VMware VSAN: VSPP Pricing Revealed
Just after the release of VSAN a couple weeks back, I wrote this post talking about the need for VSAN to appear on the VSPP pricelist. At the time there only a little info on dates and more importantly pricing. A few days later it was confirmed that VSPP pricing would appear in Q2 of this […] Read More
Quick Thought: VSAN Pricing…We need a VSPP Option
UPDATE: Looks like we will be seeing some VSPP Pricing for VSAN in Q2 vCenter and ESXi 5.5 Update 1 has reached GA, and we now have v1.0 of VSAN officially ready for production use. Technically it’s a winner, and from an industry maturity standpoint…it clearly sets a new direction in how storage is consumed […] Read More