I was in a conversation with one of my pals over at Tintri last week (Fintan), and he observed some strange behaviour when provisioning VMs from a catalog in vCloud Director (vCD). When he disabled Fast Provisioning, he expected that provisioning further VMs from the catalog would still be offloaded via the VAAI-NAS plugin. All the ESXi hosts have the VAAI-NAS plugin from Tintri installed. However, it seems that the provisioning/cloning operation was not being offloaded to the array, and the ESXi hosts resources were being used for the operation instead. Deployments of VMs from the catalogs were taking minutes…
I’m a bit late in bringing this to your attention, but there is a potential issue with VASA storage providers disconnecting from vCenter resulting in no VSAN capabilities being visible when you try to create a VM Storage Policy. These storage providers (there is one on each ESXi host participating in the VSAN Cluster) provide out-of-band information about the underlying storage system, in this case VSAN. If there isn’t at least one of these providers on the ESXi hosts communicating to the SMS (Storage Monitoring Service) on vCenter, then vCenter will not be able to display any of the capabilities…
Well, after almost 8 months of work, the VSAN book that I have been working on with Duncan Epping is finally available for general download. This is the first book I’ve written, and I’ll always be grateful for the guidance and mentoring I received from Duncan. I’m also extremely grateful to a number of people at VMware Press (Pearson) for their willingness to sponsor this project. There are also numerous people at VMware that deserve thanks for their input and support, and you’ll find them listed in the acknowledgements section of the book. We’re hopeful that this book will provide…
I am extremely excited about this year’s VMworld. I’m participating is some really great sessions, and the Essential VSAN book which Duncan Epping and I have been working on for the past 7-8 months should be available too.
We’ve seen a spate of incidents recently related to the HP Smart Array Drivers that are shipped as part of ESXi 5.x. Worst case scenario – this is leading to out of memory conditions and a PSOD (Purple Screen of Death) on the ESXi host in some cases. The bug is in the hpsa 5.5.0.58-1 driver and all Smart Array controllers that use this driver are exposed to this issue. For details on the symptom, check out VMware KB article 2075978. HP have also released a Customer Advisory c04302261 on the issue. This was a tricky one to deal with, as…
I am currently involved in a project that looks at how we can back up and restore various components of the VMware vCloud Suite. One of these components is vCOps, vCenter Operations Manager. I wanted to verify that I could backup and restore vCOps with VDP, VMware’s Data Protection product. There were a couple of scenarios that I wished to test: Restore vCops VMs outside of a vApp construct and verify that it was still operational Restore vCOps VMs inside of a new vApp construct and verify that it was still operational Restore vCOps VMs inside of the original vApp…
Very quick update … Many readers will be aware of an ongoing issue with NFS in ESXi 5.5U1. My colleague, Duncan, wrote an article about it on his blog site recently entitled – Alert: vSphere 5.5 & NFS issue. Essentially, your NFS datastore may experience an APD (All Paths Down) condition. The issue is also described in KB article 2076392. I’m pleased to say that VMware has now produced a patch to address this issue. The patch is 5.5EP4 (June 2014) and can be downloaded from VMware’s patch repository site here and will address this issue. Search on ESXi (Embedded…