In this short video, I will demonstrate a new feature of vSphere with Tanzu, namely the vSAN Data Persistence platform. In this demo, we will show how easy it is to deploy a Supervisor Service using vSAN DPp. The service that we are deploying is MinIO, a provider of on-premises S3 Object Stores. We will see how to enable the Service, and then how to provision a dedicated S3 Object Store to a particular Namespace with vSphere with Tanzu. This means that a developer or a team of developers using a particular namespace can have their own dedicated S3 Object…
Today I want to take a closer look at the new vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp). I mentioned that this was a key reason for updating my VMware Cloud Foundation environment to version 4.2, which officially released last week. One of the services included in DPp is the MinIO S3 compatible object store. Although I have written about MinIO a number of time on this site, the fact that it is now incorporated as a service in the new DPp makes it even easier to deploy than ever before. In this post, we will look at the steps involved in…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…