Virtual SAN – free 6 month trial – thank you VMUG
A short post again today. For those of you who are considering evaluating Virtual SAN, our friends over at the VMware User Group (VMUG) are giving you the opportunity to trial VSAN for 6 months. This offer is only available to VMUG members, but joining VMUG is free. And really, if you are not already a member of your local VMUG, shame on you. This is a great way to get hands-on experience with VSAN. What are you waiting for? Click here to get your six month trial of VSAN.
On the topic of VMUGs, I will be presenting on VMware’s Software Defined Storage initiatives at the Germany/Deutschland West VMUG User Conference in Frankfurt on June 17th, and again at the Poland/Polska VMUG in Warsaw on June 18th. Please sign up and support your local VMUG. If you are attending either of these VMUGs, I look forward to seeing you there.
1) When scaling up your disk groups within a host, do you simply plug a new drive into the host while it is running and the additional capacity is added to the VSAN pool? Is this true for entire disk groups as well? And more specifically, does this only work with an IO Controller that supports RAID Passthrough? (the controller my client is using now only supports RAID 0)
2) Do you know what the logic is that is being used for placement of data stripes across disk groups? My client noticed during his testing that the data was not always placed logically across all nodes in the cluster. Do we have any documentation or understanding of how this is handled or what the decision making process is for data placement?
A1. Yes, if cluster is in automatic mode. If cluster is in manual mode, you have to add them manually.
A2. I don’t believe we have published any of the algorithms regarding stripe placements.