After just deploying the newest version of Pivotal Container Services (PKS) and rolling out my first Kubernetes cluster (read all about it here), I wanted to try to do something a bit more interesting than just create another persistent volume claim to test out our vSphere Cloud Provider since I had done this a number of times already. Thanks to some of the work I have been doing with our cloud native team, I was introduced to StatefulSets. That peaked my interest a little, as I had not come across them before.
A very quick heads-up to let you know about an issue some of us experienced with vSAN 6.7U1 and about how to resolve it. We noticed that after upgrading to vSAN 6.7U1, the new Capacity History view did not work. However brand new installs of 6.7U1 worked just fine. The error that one gets from trying to look at the capacity history is “Unable to query charts data for capacity history” as shown below: I’m pleased to report that we have a solution for this issue already. It was caused by an inability to update the database schema in the…
A First Class Disk (FCD), also referred to as Improved Virtual Disk (IVDs), is one of the more recent features in vSphere that may have escaped your notice. FCDs were created to address a particular gap that we have in vSphere at this time. We are well aware that within a vSphere environment, it is currently very difficult to manage virtual disks unless they are associated with a virtual machine. A simple example would be snapshots. Snapshots work at a per VM basis, and to only snapshot a single VMDK rather than all VMDK attached to a VM involves a…
Most readers will be aware that vSAN version 6.7U1 was recently released. For those of you who wish to know more about the release, I wrote this blog article last month detailing the new features. In this post I want to cover an item which many of you may not be aware of. It is a new feature which makes the most common vSAN advanced options visible and configurable in the vSphere UI. There are 3 advanced options which we have surfaced up. The first is the VSAN.ClomRepairDelay timer which is the delay used before rebuilding ABSENT components. The second…
At this year’s VMworld, I was very fortunate to have 3 of my submitted sessions accepted for both VMworld in Las Vegas and again for VMworld in Barcelona. Not only that, but I got the opportunity to present with my friends and colleagues, Christos, Duncan and Paudie. The sessions that I presented in both Las Vegas and Barcelona were as follows: HCI1246BE – Optimizing vSAN for Performance with Paudie O’Riordan HCI1270BE – The Power of Storage Policy-Based Management with Duncan Epping HCI1338BE – vSAN: An Ideal Storage Platform for Kubernetes-controlled Cloud-Native Apps with Christos Karamanolis These have now been re-recorded…
At VMworld 2018, we announced an initiative to use EBS, Amazon Elastic Block Store, for vSAN storage. At present vSAN is configured using the current EC2 i3 configurations, which run ESXi on bare-metal. I have seen these referred to as i3p, but my understanding is that they correlate to the i3.metal instances as shown here. The Amazon EC2 i3 instances include Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD-based instance storage. These are configured with 10TB of storage per host, but there are some limitations. For one, if you wish to expand on capacity, you need to add another complete EC2 i3 instance.…
I had someone reach out to me recently, asking for a way to change the policy on a file that was uploaded to a vSAN datastore, e.g. an ISO image. When a file is uploaded to the vSAN datastore, a VM Home namespace object is created. It is into this ‘file system’ type object that the files/ISOs are stored. Initially, I looked at ways to change the VM Home namespace. I looked at various commands to change the policy and I did find some in RVC, the Ruby vSphere Console. Unfortunately all the spbm.namespace_change commands look for a VM as…