VMware has updated the application process for the vExpert program. The application is now possible all year round. Only during the selection process the portal will be closed for about 2 weeks. This is usually in February for the first half of the year and in the July/August area for the second half of the year.
This article is a result of questions that are asked frequently by my students in vSAN classes. The subject of striping sounds very simple at first, but it turns out to be quite complex once you start going away from the simple standard examples. We shed light on the striping behavior of vSAN objects in mirroring, erasure coding, and for large objects. We also show the different striping behavior before vSAN 7 Update 1 and after.
What is striping?
Striping generally refers to a technique in which logically sequential data is segmented in such a way that successive segments are stored on different physical storage devices. Striping does not create redundancy. In fact, the opposite is true. In traditional storage, striping is also referred to as RAID 0 (note: RAID 0 -> zero redundancy). By distributing the segments over several devices that can be accessed in parallel, the overall data throughput is increased while latency is reduced.
Stripe size or stripe width is the number of segments an object is split into.
With a stripe width of 2, an object of 100 GB, for example, is split into two components of 50 GB each and distributed across two storage devices. This corresponds to a RAID 0.
This blogpost was under embargo until 28th of September 2021 8:00am (PT) / 17:00 (CEST). The fact that you can read this now means that vSphere 7 Update 3 has (probably) already been released.
[Update 29th Sept 2021]: Download is not yet available. Maybe we need to wait until VMworld2021 next week.
What’s New
VMware vSphere 7 Update3 comes with a wide range of innovations. They can be categorized into the sections below:
Tanzu with Kubernetes
Lifecycle, Upgrade and Patching
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Resource Management
Availability & Resiliency
Security & Compliance
Guest OS and Workloads
Storage
Networking
vSphere Management & APIs
Another bunch of features goes into vSAN. But these features will be covered in an extra post.
I’d like to point your attention to a new and useful feature which was introduced with vSphere 7 update 2. It is easily being overlooked in the abundance of new features, but it does a very good job in the prior to a vCenter update.
A requirement for the Update Planner is participation in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP).
The first sign of a new vCenter update is a notification banner at the top of vSphere Client.
Clicking on “View Updates” will take you directly to the Update Planner. This can also be found in the menu. To do this, select the vCenter in the Hosts & Clusters view and select “Updates” > vCenter Server > Update Planner in the menu bar at the top right.
All currently available updates are being displayed. In the case shown below, the vCenter is already at 7.0 Update 2, so only one possible update is listed. If several possible updates are available, the Update Planner can check the compatibility against all of them. To do this, select the radio button of the desired update (red box).
Once an update is selected, the action field “Generate Report” turns blue and shows the two possible sub-items “Interoperability” and “Pre-Update Checks“.
Interoperabilty Checks
The Interoperability Check verifies not only the ESXi hosts but also the compatibility with other VMware products registered in vCenter.
