Our team was recently asked to take a VSAN novice through a VSAN deployment, to figure out if there were any configuration gotchas. This post will share the stumbling blocks that you might encounter deploying your own VSAN environment.
Well, VSAN is finally GA today. Check out Duncan’s blog post which has lots of good links about where to get the GA bits. In this post, I am going to address a question about the VM Home Namespace object on VSAN which has come up a number of times recently and has caused a little bit of confusion. If you’ve been following my series of Virtual SAN articles, you may recall that virtual machines deployed on a VSAN datastore are now made up as a set of objects (as opposed to the set of files that we’ve been used…
I’ve been having lots of fun lately in my new role in Integration Engineering. It is also good to have someone local once again to bounce ideas off. Right now, that person is Paudie O’Riordan (although sometimes I bet he wishes I was in a different timezone 🙂 ). One of the things we are currently looking at is a VSAN implementation using Fusion-io ioDrive2 cards (which our friends over at Fusion-io kindly lent us). The purpose of this post is to show the steps involved in configuring these cards on ESXi and adding them as nodes to a VSAN…
Very exciting day today at VMware – Virtual SAN or VSAN has been officially announced. If you weren’t able to attend, here are some of the interesting parts of the announcement: 32 node support (up from the 16 node support announced at Partner Exchange last month, and up from the 8 nodes which we supported during the beta) 2 million IOPS (using IOmeter 100% read, 4KB block size). Also 640K IOPS achieved with 70/30 read/write ratio, 4KB block size and 80% random. 3200 virtual machines (100 per node) 4.4 PB of storage (using 35 disk per host x 32 hosts…
I had the pleasure (?) recently of troubleshooting some backup issues on my vSphere Data Protection Advanced (VDPA) setup. To be honest, I had not spent a great deal of time on this product recently, other than a few simple backup and restores. However, in my new role I now have a number of other projects which requires me to understand this product’s functionality a bit more. When things were not going right for me though, I spent a lot of time searching for some log files which might give me some clue as to the nature of my problem.…
I thought it was about time that I looked at some of the larger storage vendors closer to home. One of these is of course Bull. This company is probably more familiar to those of us based in Europe rather than those of you based in the Americas or Asia Pacific. However VMware customers in EMEA will have seen them in the Solutions Exchange at VMworld Europe, where they have a reasonably large presence. After some conversation with my good pal Didier Pironet, whom I’ve met at a couple of recent VMUGs, I was introduced to Philippe Reynier who is…
There are many occasions where the information displayed in the vSphere client is not sufficient to display all relevant information about a particular storage device, or indeed to troubleshoot problems related to a storage device. The purpose of this post is to explain some of the most often used ESXCLI commands that I use when trying to determine storage device information, and to troubleshoot a particular device.