Tag: Storage

Large VM stun times during snapshot operations on VMware vSAN

In this post, I want to look at the relationship between Object Storage and some other organization personas, such as the Project Admin and the Project Advanced User.

Contribute to cloudbase/OpenVixDiskLib development by creating an account on GitHub.

Many readers may have read this blog article on Native Object Storage from my good pal, Pete Koehler. In that post, which was published back in May of this year and coincided with the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 9.1 release, Pete talked about a tech preview of Native Object Storage. Well, with the release of VCF 9.1.1, the tech preview has now begun. Although the tech preview of Native Object Storage is not open to everybody, we will be working with a select set of customers and gathering critical feedback. Our objective is to have a robust Native Object…

I've run Nextcloud for years and I like it, but OpenCloud caught my eye. It's the continuation of ownCloud Infinite Scale, written in Go, with no database to babysit and no schema migrations to worry about. In this guide I go over where OpenCloud came from, how it stacks up against Nextcloud, and then a full Docker Compose setup with a real domain and certificate, storage on a local disk, full text search, and browser based document editing with Euro-Office. All links and resources are down below.

Putting videos on YouTube is a convenient solution, but not a privacy-friendly one. Using HLS, it's possible to self-host videos while being...

This is probably the question I get asked most about Spacetime. It’s a simple enough question, and it certainly seems like it should have a simple answer. Scaling is a complex topic, and the devil is…

Following the deployment of VMware Cloud Foundation, it is crucial to configure SFTP backup locations for VCF management services, SDDC Manager, and vCenter. Regular backups safeguard against data …

Hosting Git repositories at scale is a nightmare. When Linus Torvalds designed the first version ofthe information manager from hell(that's actually the tagline for Git,look it up), he had a very spec

Re-benchmarking the three-node Ceph-over-Thunderbolt cluster under real production load, days after the original build, and asking whether the numbers hold up or were just good for a novelty setup.

The same class of NVMe drive failed three times in 48 hours on my three-node Thunderbolt cluster: a real NVMe firmware bug, a smartctl red herring, a fix I already had half of by accident, and a ten-hour alerting blind spot I didn't know I had.

Compare VCF 9.1 import, convergence, and side-by-side rebuild paths for brownfield vSphere, with NSX, storage, rollback, and validation guidance.

When uploading VM OVA or ISO images to VCF Automation Content Library via the UI the file is first staged into tenant-manager-transfer-bucket S3 object store and only after it is fully uploaded it …

I was recently cleaning up some orphaned vSphere Container Volumes and while I was able to compare the Persistent Volumes (PV) IDs against the ones currently in use by a couple of Kubernetes cluste…

Historically, enabling NVMe Tiering prior to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 was not very user friendly, as it required users to remember three distinct ESXCLI commands. # Enable or Disable NVMe …

VMware vSAN and Samsung's JBOF reference design show what happens when you decouple flash capacity from compute — and why it matters for AI-ready infrastructure.

XO 6.5 is out: QCOW2 GA, bidirectional replication, traffic rules on networks and VIFs, richer Prometheus metrics, plus a fresh Kubernetes CSI release and a Cluster API teaser.

Learn the Proxmox VM disk settings I change on every new VM for better performance, storage efficiency, and responsiveness.

This video highlights the key features introduced in Proxmox Virtual Environment 9.2. The release debuts a Dynamic Load Balancer for real-time cluster resource scheduling and automated high-availability (HA) migrations. Networking receives an enterprise overhaul with native WireGuard and BGP fabrics for secure cross-site inter-node connections, alongside granular Route Maps and Prefix Lists for advanced BGP/EVPN route filtering.

When you upgrade VCF Automation to version 9.1, new VCF Services Runtime consumption cluster (internally called VMSP = VMware Management Services Platform) is deployed and the old one is left behin…

When you delete a Kubernetes (K8s) cluster, you can sometimes end up with orphaned disks (persistent volumes) on your datastore. It can be difficult to identify them and they can take up unnecessar…

Driving down the cost of storage is the motivation behind our ongoing work to improve efficiency in vSAN. When you can store more data on the same physical hardware through software enhancements, everybody wins. vSAN in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 delivers two new enhancements that improve storage efficiency: new data compression capabilities and the … Continued

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 was just announced, and that means a lot of new functionality has been released. Some of the features you already knew about, others may come as a surprise. I know Pete Koehler has a whole series he is going to release, so I am just going to introduce a couple of […]

Diskless Linux Boot

In this video, I upgrade my old 2-node Proxmox cluster into a proper 3-node Proxmox cluster with Ceph storage. I’ll show why the old QDevice setup was useful for learning, where it started to fall apart for real high availability, and how Ceph changes the way VM storage works in a Proxmox cluster. We’ll go through the Ceph installation, monitors, managers, OSDs, RBD storage, pool settings, placement groups, and finally a live migration test to see if the VM can move between nodes while staying online.

Does anyone else remember when XCOPY via VAAI was released on vSphere? How cool it was to offload the copy of a VM to the array. It only got cooler as the storage vendors figured out how to not act…

A practical field-focused walkthrough of building an All Apps Organization in VMware Cloud Foundation 9 using VCF Automation, with emphasis on regions, quotas, networking design, and why manual setup matters over quick start.

Healthchecks.io ping endpoints accept HTTP HEAD, GET, and POST request methods. When using HTTP POST, clients can include an arbitrary payload in the request body. Healthchecks.io stores the first 100kB of the request body. If the request body is tiny, Healthchecks.io stores it in the PostgreSQL database. Otherwise, it stores it in S3-compatible object storage. [...]

A tale about misconfiguring nginx, from adventures in production

J.HOMMET.NET - Humain analogue dans un monde numérique.

Modern web interface for FreeBSD. Unified management of Bhyve VMs, Jails, ZFS storage, networking, and system monitoring.

J’ai installé Home Assistant OS en VM sur Proxmox avec ZFS, réplication multi-nœuds et 2 backups/jour. Guide complet : création VM, HAOS vs Docker, Zigbee en Docker.

VMware vSAN stands as a cornerstone of the modern Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), offering robust, high-performance, and scalable storage solutions integrated directly into the hypervisor. As the

Storage Policy–Based Management (SPBM)is the backbone of how VMware vSAN delivers predictable, workload‑aligned outcomes. Instead of carving LUNs or managing fixed RAID groups the old-fashioned way,po

How to build a single global queue for distributed systems on object storage: Start with a single file on object storage, then add write batching, a stateless broker, and high-availability.

See how I built a Proxmox and Ceph home lab with 5 nodes, 17TB NVMe storage, dual 10Gb LACP, and Talos Kubernetes running on distributed Ceph.

Short blog about my experiences with Nutanix CE and which workarounds I needed.

The Nutanix Cloud Bible - A detailed narrative of the Nutanix architecture, how the software and features work and how to leverage it for maximum performance.

Author: Nemanja Ilic

We usually learn that 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes, 1 MB is 1024 kilobytes, etc. But is this true or a kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

Over the last couple of months, various new vSAN features were announced. Two of those features are around the Stretched Cluster configuration, and have probably been the number 1 feature request for a few years. Now that we have Site Takeover and Site Maintenance functionality available, I am starting to get some questions about the […]

How we built blockdiff, an open-source tool for rapid block-level diffs and snapshots of VM disks.

Introduction As virtualisation workloads expand, RAM alone can struggle to meet performance requirements. Starting with ESXi 8 Update 3, VMware now allows administrators to use NVMe SSDs as a memor…

Sourcing data directly from diskISfaster than caching in memory. I brought receipts.
Because hardware got wider but not faster, the old methods don't get you there. You need new tools to use what is

Good news here for customers who use iSCSI in their current vSphere environments and are looking to move to VCF

If you have a Synology NAS and want to use an iSCSI LUN with Proxmox Backup Server, check out this post for the full details.

Follow this How-to to configure a Synology NFS share for use with Proxmox Backup Server as a backup datastore. Bonus includes virtualizing PBS on your Synology NAS.

how to add read-write-many (RWX) volumes to a Pod in VKS which were initially created by the Volume Service

In this post, I will show you the steps to create a static volume via the Volume Service, and then create the appropriate manifests in your VKS cluster to make the volume available to Pods running on your cluster.

How to migrate from RAIDZ1 to RAIDZ2 without a spare ZFS server or a boatload of extra disks.

A step-by-step guide to configuring a vSAN ESA over RDMA cluster and a troubleshooting methodology.

Miniature rack builds, for portable or compact Homelabs.

When you read my blog articles and stuff – you may get the idea that everything I do – just happens to be right and that I succeed at every attempt. This article is here to remind you t…

A deep dive into KubeVirt for vSphere admins. Learn VM creation, storage, networking, and operations mapped to familiar VMware concepts.

Take an interactive journey through the history of IO devices, and learn how IO device latency affects performance.

Part 2 VCF Import Cluster with NFS and activating the overlay.

the latest version of Data Services Manger (DSM) is now available. Version 2.2 has a wealth of new features

You've been lied to. You don't need the cloud – you can just run servers and save 10x your AWS costs. It's not that difficult.

I want my services to be sturdy, cheap & easy to maintain. I want very few moving parts, and I treat the hardware as disposable and unreliable. Ansible allows me to achieve a lot at very little cost.

Delivering consistent performance while maintaining data resiliency is a key tenet behind enterprise storage solutions. VMware vSAN is the industry leading distributed storage system built right into VMware vSphere, and is designed to offer the highest level of resiliency and performance, with the maximum amount of agility should hardware faults occur, or demands of the … Continued

In this post, we will investigate the performance of disk encryption on Linux and explain how we made it at least two times faster for ourselves and our customers!

Replacing Orange Livebox with another router is widely documented but too kludgy for my taste. I expose a cleaner setup.

Intro
I have been experimenting a lot over the past 18 months with containers and in particular, Kubernetes, and one of the core things I always seemed to get hung up on was part-zero - creating the VMs to actually run K8s. I wanted a CLI only way to build a VM template for the OS and then deploy that to the cluster.
It turns out that with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (in particular the cloud image OVA) there are a few things need changed from the base install (namely cloud-init) in order to make them play nice with OS Guest Customisation in vCenter.