4 out of 5 storage partners surveyed would recommend VVols for their customers who use VMware

Remember the old Trident gum commercial, it was a ringing endorsement from dentists for their patients that chew gum. Well recently VMware hosted a Virtually Speaking podcast featuring various storage partners to talk about VVols. The podcast featured representatives from key VVols partners: HPE, Pure, HDS and NetApp along with Bryan Young (VVols product manager), Pete Flecha, John Nicholson and Jason Massae from VMware.

I happened to be one of the people representing HPE and we talked about various topics including adoption and how customers are using VVols. When it comes to adoption both VMware and all partners are seeing increasing customer usage of VVols and every partner recommends that customers check out VVols and see what they are missing out on. So go listen to the podcast here, and what about that 5th partner? Apparently they didn’t show up but I’m confident they would recommend VVols to their customers as well.

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    • david puckett on May 24, 2019 at 10:36 am
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    How many out of how many customers recommend VVOLs?

    1. Hopefully all of them 😉 Can’t speak for other vendors but at HPE we have over 1,400 customers using VVols right now.

    • anthony m on August 20, 2019 at 4:41 pm
    • Reply

    VVols are great until they break.

    Or you lose your keys. Where can we find some troubleshooting information for vvols. I have had a couple of calls with vmware and they couldn’t help troubleshoot vvols at all and actually recommended some actions that destroyed VMs. Luckily no one believed it was a good idea so we cloned the VM to real storage prior.

    Sure its magic and you better be a wizard if it ever breaks.\

    Cheers!

    1. Generally there is nothing there to break, there may be some initial setup issues that can occur but once you have everything configured it is pretty solid. The VASA Provider is the most vulnerable component, but if it’s within the array again it’s usually rock solid. For support I’d always go to the storage, most of the implementation of VVols is on the vendor side so I woudl always start there.

    • anthony m on August 20, 2019 at 4:53 pm
    • Reply

    I have heard that in the event of an array crash recovering VVols is interesting because of their granular nature. It can require a single command that has 1000s of characters to manipulate them. Do you have any test cases for vvol/storage crash recovery? Every person that I have talked to that has suffered a failure didn’t have any reasonable choice but to restore from backup….. and they didnt restore the data to vvols.

    • anthony m on February 14, 2020 at 2:29 pm
    • Reply

    I work in enterprise storage support so I see issues when things break. Sure most things don’t break but when the do it is a problem for large enterprises. These issues occur after production data is on them and they are in a bind when it breaks. In most other instances when vvols are not used I can fix it or find resources that can. Vvols are the exception. I havent found anyone within my org or within Vmware that could provide enough support to recover data without a restore from backup.

    Would you be a resource to help? I believe we may work for the same company.

    Please help if you can,
    Anthony

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