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…

TKG & vSAN File Service for RWX (Read-Write-Many) Volumes

A common question I get in relation to VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid  (TKG) is whether or not it supports vSAN File Service, and specifically the read-write-many (RWX) feature for container volumes. To address this question, we need to make a distinction into how TKG is being provisioned. There is the multi-cloud version of TKG, which can run on vSphere, AWS or Azure, and are deployed from a TKG manager. Then there is the embedded TKG edition where ‘workload clusters’ are deployed in Namespaces via vSphere with Tanzu / VCF with Tanzu. To answer the question about whether or not TKG…

vSAN 7.0U1 – File Service SMB Support

One of the new, exciting features in vSAN 7.0U1 is the extension to vSAN File Service. As well as supporting NFS v3 & v4.1, we now also support SMB (Server Message Block) protocols v2 & v3. This protocol is commonly associated with Windows File Shares. In this post, I will go through the new configuration steps, and then we shall present the new created SMB file share to a Windows desktop. One of the new prerequisites, which wasn’t needed with NFS file shares, is that Active Directory integration is required for SMB. We will see this new step during the…

Persistent Volume Placement in HCI-Mesh deployments

One of the new features introduced in vSphere 7.0U1 is HCI-Mesh, the ability to remotely mount vSAN datastores between vSAN clusters managed by the same vCenter Server. My buddy and colleague Duncan has done a great write-up on this topic on his yellow-bricks blog. In this post, I am going to look at how to address the situation of selecting the correct vSAN datastore when provisioning Kubernetes Persistent Volumes in an environment which uses HCI-Mesh. This will address the support statement in the vSAN HCI-Mesh Tech-Note that states that the following use case is not supported: Remote provisioning workflows for…

vSAN Capacity Management in v7.0U1

With the release of vSAN 7.0U1, a major change was made with regards to what was termed “slack space” requirements. This basically referred to how much space should be set aside on the vSAN datastore for operational and rebuild purposes. I have had a few queries about this recently, so I thought I would take the opportunity to highlight some of the capacity management features now available in vSAN.  This would also be a good time to revisit the advanced options for Automatic Rebalance, as well as discuss the Reactive Rebalance features that we have had in vSAN for some…

vSAN 7.0U1 – What’s new?

VMware has just announced the next release of their Hyper-converged Infrastructure product, vSAN 7.0 Update 1 (U1). In this post, I will cover some of the main big-ticket items that have been included in this release. You’ll notice quite a number of new features and additional functionality, and some of these have been requested for quite some time, so it is fantastic to finally see them in the product. vSAN File Services now supports the SMB protocol In vSAN 7.0, we announced support for vSAN File Services. In that release, we supported the creation of NFS volumes that could be…

vSAN File Services and Cloud Native Storage integration (Video)

In this short video, I want to show some of the integration points between vSAN 7.0 File Services, and Cloud Native Storage (CNS). We will use the CSI driver that ships with vSphere 7.0 to provision a new read-write-many persistent volume backed by a vSAN file share. A read-write-many persistent volume is one that can be accessed by multiple Kubernetes Pods simultaneously. I will then show how CNS provides the vSphere client all sorts of useful information about the volume. This information is invaluable to a vSphere Admin when trying to figure out how vSphere storage is being consumed when…