Forum Discussion

rlawson's avatar
rlawson
Novice I
1 month ago
Solved

Where to go now the Virtual Volumes are deprecated?

So the day has finally come that we need to begin planning to upgrade to the ESX 9.1 Platform, which means of course Virtual Volumes will no longer work at all.

We have come to heavily rely on Virtual Volumes, and seeing that functionality go away is absolutely crushing. Everpure said last year when announcing this: 

There are a lot of projects that have now been accelerated due to this change and some engineering resources have already been committed to achieve this acceleration; other engineering resources are being committed for this work.  

To date I have seen no announcements about these other projects.

Is there any alternative we have other than just going back to old-fashioned VMFS volumes?

vmware
VSPHERE
  • dinocloud's avatar
    dinocloud
    1 month ago

    Hey Lawson!  I'm an FSA for Virt working in the field with Everpure customers on this exact thing. Largely, most customers I work with are going VMFS. For the customers that liked the "per-vm" monitoring vVols gave in vCenter, some are choosing NFS with our VAAI VIB installed on the ESXi hosts with AutoDir enabled. This gives you a managed directory for each VM and shows monitoring graphs per VM. 

    Many customers are using vVols for DB clone refresh processes, in which customers are usually going with a combo of VMFS for the OS drives and RDM's for the data drives. There are alternatives to do entirely VMFS, but it will require more lines of scripting to fully refresh those drives. There are some code examples on the github page here: 

    https://github.com/PureStorage-OpenConnect

3 Replies

  • dinocloud's avatar
    dinocloud
    Everpure
    1 month ago

    Hey Lawson!  I'm an FSA for Virt working in the field with Everpure customers on this exact thing. Largely, most customers I work with are going VMFS. For the customers that liked the "per-vm" monitoring vVols gave in vCenter, some are choosing NFS with our VAAI VIB installed on the ESXi hosts with AutoDir enabled. This gives you a managed directory for each VM and shows monitoring graphs per VM. 

    Many customers are using vVols for DB clone refresh processes, in which customers are usually going with a combo of VMFS for the OS drives and RDM's for the data drives. There are alternatives to do entirely VMFS, but it will require more lines of scripting to fully refresh those drives. There are some code examples on the github page here: 

    https://github.com/PureStorage-OpenConnect

  • dinocloud's avatar
    dinocloud
    Everpure
    1 month ago

    I will also say, that some customers are getting the exception to have VCF 9 support. The kb  keeps updating to push back the  official EoL date. That KB is here and notice the comment "Limited-time support may be considered on a case-by-case basis for customers desiring vVols support in VCF/VVF 9.0. Such customers should contact their Broadcom representative or Broadcom support for further guidance." https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleId=401070

  • Ludes's avatar
    Ludes
    Community Manager
    1 month ago

    Hi Richard - alex_carver​ posted about this in a thread previously and I'll make sure they jump in here to continue the conversation.  Please reference this link and let us know how we can help as you navigate thru this - webb​ 

    https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/discussions/virtualization/navigating-vvols-vsphere-virtual-volumes-end-of-life-with-pure-storage/3086