vsan.resync_dashboard only reports VM resyncing, not templates

While doing some testing yesterday in our lab, we noticed that after we had placed a host participating in a VSAN cluster into maintenance mode and chose the option to evacuate the data from the host to the remaining nodes in the cluster, the “Enter Maintenance Mode” task was still sitting at 63% complete even though it seemed that the resynchronization of components was complete. For example, when we used the vsan.resync_dashboard RVC command, there were 0 bytes left to sync: > vsan.resync_dashboard /localhost/ie-datacenter-01/computers/ie-vsan-01/ 2014-11-06 12:07:45 +0000: Querying all VMs on VSAN … 2014-11-06 12:07:45 +0000: Querying all objects ..…

VSAN and OEM ESXi ISO images

There has been a bit of confusion recently over the use of OEM ESXi ISO images and Virtual SAN. These OEM ESXi ISO images allow our partners to pre-package a bunch of their own drivers and software components so that you have them available to you immediately on install. While this can be very beneficial for non-VSAN environments, it is not quite so straight-forward for VSAN deployments. Drivers associated with VSAN have to go through extra testing for some very good reasons that I will allude to shortly. The issue really pertains to the drivers that are shipped with many…

Catch me at a VMUG in November

I’ve been fortunate enough to receive a bunch of invites to present at various VMware User Group (VMUG) meetings around Europe next month. This year I’ll be presenting a “Virtual SAN (VSAN) troubleshooting and gotchas” type session, so anyone with an interest in VSAN or EVO:RAIL should find this useful. So where will you find me?

A closer look at Nexenta Connect for VSAN

Whilst at VMworld 2014, I had the opportunity to catch up with the Nexenta team who have been working on a very interesting project with VMware’s Virtual SAN (VSAN). The Nexenta Connect for VSAN product, running on top of VSAN, is designed to provide file services, which allows VSAN to not only store your virtual machines, but also to provide SMB and NFS shares for those virtual machines. I caught up with Michael Letschin and Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn of the Nexenta team to learn more and get a tech preview of the product.

Heads Up! Incorrect reporting of Outstanding IO in VSAN Observer

Hi all, A quick note to let you know about a new KB article that has recently been published which reports incorrect values for Outstanding IO in the VSAN Observer tool used for monitoring performance of VSAN deployments when using vSphere 5.5U2. KB 2091979 reports the issue as follows: Virtual SAN (VSAN) Observer graphs in the “VSAN Client”, “VSAN Disk”, “DOM Owner” or individual VSAN object on the “VM” tab show very high Outstanding I/O (OIO) value that is inconsistent with the actual I/O load. Here is a sample screenshot from my VSAN environment running vSphere 5.5U2. As you can see…

VSAN Part 29 – Cannot complete file creation operation

There was a very interesting discussion on our internal forums here at VMware over the past week. One of our guys had built out a VSAN cluster, and everything looked good. However on attempting to deploy a virtual machine on the VSAN datastore, he kept hitting an error which reported that it “cannot complete file creation operation”. As I said, everything looked healthy. The cluster formed correctly, there were no network partitions and the network status was normal. So what could be the problem?

My VMworld 2014 – Barcelona (#STO2996-SPO #TEX1985)

After a great VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, it’s nearly time for the European version which is once again in the beautiful city of Barcelona, Spain.  I thought I’d put together a short post on some of my activities, Hopefully you can join me for some. Introduction to Virtual Volumes –  vBrownBag session (Tuesday, October 14th at 2:15pm – Hang Space) I’m delighted to be joined by Nick Dyer of Nimble Storage for an overview of our forthcoming Virtual Volumes. I’ll be sharing our vision for VVols in the whole Software Define Storage story, and Nick will share with you…