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.

Where are they now? Recent changes in the storage space

The storage space has been a very exciting space over recent years. There have been so many new start-ups and new innovations, that it becomes difficult to keep track sometimes. More recently, there has been a lot of news around mergers, acquisitions, shutdowns and IPOs in the storage industry. It got me thinking about a lot of the changes we have seen over the past number of years in the storage market. Just for my own interest, I went back over many of my blogs, and the various conversations I had with people at various VMworld events and VMUG meetings,…

Losing the VASA Provider and/or vCenter Server in VVols

With the release of vSphere 6.0 earlier this year, VMware introduced the eagerly anticipated VVols or Virtual Volumes. As we see more and more traction around VVols, a specific question has come up a number of times already. The question is basically: “What happens to VVols if I lose my VASA Provider or my vCenter Server, or indeed both of these components? Will I still have access to my devices?”.

Virtual Volumes (VVols) and Replication/DR

There have been a number of queries around Virtual Volumes (VVols) and replication, especially since the release of KB article 2112039 which details all the interoperability aspects of VVols. In Q1 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware Products are interoperable with Virtual Volumes (VVols)?” The response includes “VMware vSphere Replication 6.0.x”. In Q2 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware Products are currently NOT interoperable with Virtual Volumes (VVols)?” The response includes “VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.x to 6.0.x” In Q4 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware vSphere 6.0.x features are…

VSAN 6.0 Part 7 – Blinking those blinking disk LEDs

Before I begin, this isn’t really a feature of VSAN so to speak. In vSphere 6.0, you can also blink LEDs on disk drives without VSAN deployed. However, because of the scale up and scale out features in VSAN 6.0, where you can have very many disk drives and very many ESXi hosts, being able to identify a drive for replacement becomes very important. So this is obviously a useful feature. And of course I wanted to test it out, see how it works, etc. In my 4 node cluster, I started to test this feature on some disks in…

Heads Up! HP Smart Array Driver Issue

We’ve seen a spate of incidents recently related to the HP Smart Array Drivers that are shipped as part of ESXi 5.x. Worst case scenario – this is leading to out of memory conditions and a PSOD (Purple Screen of Death) on the ESXi host in some cases. The bug is in the hpsa 5.5.0.58-1 driver and all Smart Array controllers that use this driver are exposed to this issue. For details on the symptom, check out VMware KB article 2075978. HP have also released a Customer Advisory c04302261 on the issue. This was a tricky one to deal with, as…