In the VSAN 6.0 Design & Sizing Guide, a caveat was placed around the size of a VMDK, and the Number of Failures to Tolerate (FTT) number. It reads like this: “If the VMDK size is greater than 16TB, then the maximum value for NumberOfFailuresToTolerate is 1.” I’m pleased to say that this restriction has been lifted in VSAN 6.2.
Our friends over at Pearson and VMware Press have informed us that the second edition of the Essential Virtual SAN book (that I wrote with Duncan Epping) is now available for pre-order on Amazon. It looks like it will be available on June 13th, but VMware Press have told us that they will do what they can to pull the date in a little closer. This new edition covers all of the new features added to Virtual SAN, up to the latest (yet to be released) VSAN 6.2. Here’s some blurb on the new edition, which gives a little insight…
I got a bit of a surprise a few weeks back when I noticed a register article by Chris Mellor stating that PrimaryIO (previously CacheBox) had announced a new cache acceleration I/O filter for vSphere. We first announced plans for VAIO (vSphere APIs for I/O Filters) back at VMworld 2014. VAIO allows VMware partners to plug their products/features directly into the VM I/O Path which in turn will give our customers access to 3rd party storage services/features like deduplication, compression, replication or encryption which may not be available on their storage array. Or in this case, a cache acceleration feature.…
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to meet with a number of VMware customers in both Singapore and in the UAE. Most of the sessions were enablement and education type sessions, where there was a lot of white-boarding of VSAN (VMware’s hyper-converged infrastructure product) and Virtual Volumes (VVols – Software Defined Storage or SDS for the storage arrays). This wasn’t a sales session; I’m not in sales. The objective of these sessions was simply to educate. I guess when you are immersed in this stuff 24×7, it easy to fall into the trap of believing that everyone is well…
This is an exercise that we ran through in our lab environment, and we thought that the steps would be useful to share here. By way of introduction, our 4 node cluster is split into a 2+2+1 configuration, where there are 2 ESXi hosts on site A (VLAN 4), 2 ESXi hosts on site B (VLAN 3), and a third site, site C (VLAN 80), hosting the witness appliance (nested ESXi host). All sites are connected over L3. In other words, static routes are added to each of the ESXi hosts so that ESXi hosts on site A can reach…
Many seasoned VSAN administrators will know how heavily we rely on VSAN Observer to get an understanding of the underlying performance of VSAN. While VSAN Observer is a very powerful tool, it does have some drawbacks. For one, it does not provide historic performance data, it simply gives a real-time view of the state of the system as it is currently, not what it was like previously. VSAN Observer is also a separate tool and is not integrated with vSphere web client, thus you didn’t have a “single pane of glass” view of the system. The tool is also complex,…
Those of you who have a good understanding of VSAN at this stage will know that a virtual machine deployed on the VSAN datastore is deployed as a set of objects, and not a set of files, which is how a VM is deployed on traditional datastores. Those objects include the VM Home Namespace, VMDKs and of course VM Swap. VM Swap is interesting, in that it only exists when the VM is powered on, but on VSAN it has always been provisioned with 100% Object Space Reservation in the past. This has some drawbacks, since it tended to consume…