PernixData: What is it? Does vSAN render it obsolete?

What is it?:
Simply put, it's flash acceleration.  You install a VIB in ESXi and register the PernixData Management (virtual management appliance) plugin to vCenter.  You can then take flash drives from each of your ESXi servers and clump them together to make a flash tier across all your hosts.

Does vSAN render it obsolete?:
Not really, it's a good solution to augment any existing SAN you might have.  It also won't require much change.  The scenery maybe changes as vSAN increases its configs max and traditional SANs fade, but that probably won't be for a long while.

The cool things:

  1. You can use any SSD you want.  You don't have to purchase high-end or vendor specific SSD's.
  2. Reads and Writes can be accelerated.
    1. If the SSD fails, if configured, replicates that write to another SSD in the cluster.
    2. Yes, you would use network bandwidth @ this point only until the failed SSD is replaced.
    3. Most flash caching will only do reads because write redundancy can be somewhat problematic.
  3. If you use something like NetApps backup and recovery services, you don't have to replace it because you are not inherently changing anything.
    1. vSAN you would likely need to look @ a third-party or for small implementation VMware's backup solution.
    2. Assuming PernixData will support NFS in the future.
  4. Usable from ESXi 5.0
    1. vSAN requires 5.5 U1
This is a good in-between vSAN and standard monolithic SAN arrays.  If you are using NFS, unfortunately, you are out of luck currently.  Support for NFS is supposed to be on the way though.

You can find out more here:



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NSX-T: Release associated invalid node ID from certificate

Image
Summary: Basically had an expiring certificate registered in NSX-T that was associated to a node_id that is no longer valid.  Long story short, there wasn't anything obvious in API to delete or disassociate a certificate from a node_id for 3.2.2.  Not sure how things got in this state, but annotating for future reference.  This may change in future revisions, so always check API for latest. Details: Effectively had a stale node associated w/ a certificate that was expiring.  Could not delete certificate until that node was disassociated from the certificate. To get certificate details and associated node_id's, you can use the following curl call (UI works too): curl -k -X GET -H "Content-Type: application/json" -u admin https://<manager ip>/api/v1/trust-management/certificates/<cert UUID> Above will return something like this: Below must be run from one of the manager nodes via elevation to root: ONLY RUN THIS IF YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE OF WHAT YOU ARE DO...
Read more

NSX-T: vCenter and NSX-T Inventory out of Sync (Hosts in vSphere not showing up in NSX-T)

Image
Summary: NSX-T loses synch w/ vCenter inventory, but statuses don't appear to show an issue.  Basically, you add a host to a vCenter cluster, NSX-T bits should start to automatically installing on new host.  Assuming you've created a Transport Node Profile and associated w/ the cluster.  The problem is that NSX-T doesn't see the new host and its link to the compute manager (vCenter) looks fine. Looks fine, Y U NO WORK!? So what's going on here?  This appears to affect NSX-T 2.5 and 2.5.1.  Cause is unknown. Workaround: Restart the cm-inventory service on each NSX-T mgmt/controller node using API or CLI. Details: If you were to query the status of the cm-inventory via API or CLI, you could query all 3 manager/controller nodes and get a status of running.  Even if the primary node associated w/ the VIP, if configured, is not necessarily in charge of inventory.  So you could restart the cm-inventory service till you are blue in the face ...
Read more

MacOS: AnyConnect VPN client was unable to successfully verify the IP forwarding table modifications.

Image
The VPN client was unable to successfully verify the IP forwarding table modification.  A VPN connection will not be established. Summary: I started running into issue utilizing Cisco AnyConnect on my Mac basically complaining about not able to overwrite IP forwarding tables.  This was on 4.6.x.  Since my VPN endpoints were not providing me w/ an updated client and w/ no access to Cisco Anyconnect downloads, my only option was to try openconnect.  It was totally worth it, here is why and how to set it up. PreReqs: Homebrew Installing OpenConnect: Launch MacOS Terminal brew install openconnect Getting VPN IP's/DNS Endpoints from AnyConnect: The information is typically located in your profile xml files located here: /opt/cisco/anyconnect/profile/somethingsomething.xml In the xml file, you are looking for "<HostAddress>typicallyaDNSName.com</HostAddress>" entry.  These are your VPN endpoints that you would need to pass to openconnec...
Read more