vSAN 7.0 U2 – What’s new?

I know that there has been a lot of content already written in relation to the latest 7.0U2 release of vSAN. My good pal Duncan has done a considerable amount on work to highlight the new features, and has an excellent set of YouTube videos that you can review at your convenience. However, I thought I would create a bite-sized overview of some of the big ticket items that are in the vSAN 7.0U2 release, as many of my readers have asked me about some of these features in the past. I’m not covering all of the features, of which…

vSAN 7.0U1 – Object Format Health Warning after Disk Format v13 Upgrade

This is something I noticed on my own lab after applying the most recent disk format (version 13) to my vSAN 7.0U1 environment. I already described the new Capacity Management features in vSAN 7.0U1 in a previous post. One of these features in the new capacity reserve which dramatically lowers the slack space requirements, and which are now controlled by two new parameters, Operations Reserve and Host Rebuild Reserve. Slack space is the term we used for the amount of space that needed to be set aside for operations such as the reconfiguration of objects after a policy change, and…

View 7.1 and vSAN 6.6.1 interop – nice fix

Last week, I was rolling out Horizon View v7.1 on my new vSAN 6.6.1 all-flash configuration in the lab. Now, one of the pet peeves a few of us have had with this configuration was that a warning was always reported around read cache reservations on all-flash vSAN. Of course, read cache is irrelevant to all-flash (AF) configurations as it does not use a read cache; this is only applicable to hybrid vSAN configurations. This is why it was such as annoyance.

Some nice new features in vSAN 6.6.1

For those of you who may have missed it, vSphere 6.5U1 was released very recently. This new release of vSphere also brought along a new release of vSAN, version 6.6.1. Included in this release are a few really nice features that did not make it into the major 6.6 release of vSAN that we had earlier this year. However some of these features are quite significant, especially as we work to make HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) more and more easy to deploy, configure and manage.

My VMworld Session – VSAN POC – now available

One of the break-out sessions that I presented at VMworld 2015 on Virtual SAN (VSAN) has been recorded and is now available on YouTube. I co-presented “STO4572 Conducting a Successful Virtual SAN Proof of Concept” with Julienne Pham of VMware, who did the initial part of the session. Julienne explains the planning phase, the kinds of things you need to think about, the conversations that need to take place within the organization and especially the IT team, and then what tools you have available to help you deliver the VSAN Proof Of Concept. I come on stage later on to…

Announcing Virtual SAN Health Check Plugin 6.0 Patch 1

Announcing some important news for VSAN 6.0 users, especially those using the VSAN Health Check Plugin. If you are using the Virtual SAN Health Check Plugin version 6.0 (and if you use Virtual SAN 6.0, you definitely should be using it), there is a new patch now available. Note that this new Health Check plugin version 6.0.1 release only requires the vCenter server to be updated. There are no new ESXi host side VIBs required. The patch comes as a new installable RPM for the vCenter appliance and a new MSI for Windows versions of vCenter server. [Update] For the…