A guest article by Michael Aharon In the last several years, there has been an increased desire to have deeper visibility and insights into what is going on within customers’ data centers. Especially with wider adoption of AI/ML, demand for insight-driven outcomes has increased. Customers are looking to have a single pane of glass that…
A guest post by Erik Zandboer In the last episodes we failed an entire datacenter with and without a witness. This time we will be failing a PowerStore array only, and leave all ESXi hosts running. This should trigger an APD (All Paths Down) scenario in the impacted datacenter, and we should see VMware High…
A guest post by Erik Zandboer In the previous episode of breaking stuff we powered off all hosts in one of the datacenters… Not really eventful as we were leaning mostly (if not all) on VMware vSphere’s HA capabilities. Now let’s put thing up a notch… And fail an entire datacenter! In this episode we will break a…
After we killed the datacenter interlink in the last episode, today we will be pulling the power from all hosts in one of the twin datacenters and see what will happen. As there is nothing impacting the actual metro storage solution, this will be a complete VMware play where the cluster will have to recover from….
A guest post by Erik Zandboer Now that have are done describing the lab in the last episode, we are ready to go out and break stuff! Today we will be looking at non-eventful failures, and the first we will actually be testing in the lab: What if the interlink fails?!? As always, if you’re not…
A guest post by Erik Zandboer Continuing the brief history of metro from part 2 of the series with some things that really help in building out a proper active/active metro environment: “sidedness” and “witness”. Both help in recovering from certain failure scenarios while making sure there is no possibility of split brain. (and if you…
Dell Virtual Storage Integrator is a plug-in that extends the VMware vSphere Web Client, allowing users of the vSphere Web Client to perform Dell storage related tasks within the same tool they use to manage their VMware virtualized environment. If you are new to VSI, I recommend you first read about it here What’s new in…
A guest post by Erik Zandboer In the previous “a brief history of metro” blog post (part 1) I discussed replication and metro and how they are “the same but different”. In this episode I will look at the two ways a storage solution can architect metro through uniform and non-uniform access methods. (And if you are not a fan of reading…
A guest post by Erik Zandboer In order to fully understand metro configurations, let’s first look at the history of things. The earliest ways of recovering from datacenter failures (apart from restoring all of your tapes 😉 ) was by using replication. Later metro also entered the scene, and there are some distinct differences between these…
A guest post by Erik Zandboer Powerstore Metro Dell has has metro support embedded into the Powerstore platform for some time now, but lacked support of a witness. I often get into discussions where people tend to think that not having a witness can cause split-brain scenarios. Actually it won’t, but there are some implications…
