A short post today to let you know about a new VMware training class that I helped to create. This new class is called VMware vSAN Production Operations, and is a new 3 day class delivered by our Education Services division. As you can imagine from the title, this class is geared towards administrators who are responsible for managing vSAN on a daily basis in a production environment. The class focuses primarily on operational considerations such as storage policy change impacts, hardware monitoring and replacement, scaling up and scaling out the cluster, data services (e.g. encryption), maintenance mode considerations and…
A short note to let you know that Duncan and I have made the e-book version of our Essential Virtual SAN (vSAN) book available for free. We have now published it via the GitBook platform and you can find it on vsan-essentials.com. GitBook also gives you the option to download it in PDF, EPUB or MOBI formats. While the book is based on vSAN version 6.2, the vast majority is still applicable to vSAN today. For anyone working with vSAN, we think you will find it very useful. And yes, we are looking at updating the content to a later…
This week I had the opportunity to take a closer look at ECS, the Elastic Cloud Storage product from DELL-EMC. ECS normally ships as a physical appliance, composed of multiple nodes/servers, but there is also a community edition available which is FREE with no time limit for non-production use. You can download it from here, and deploy it across VMs. Now I’ve already been looking at various ways to provide an S3 object store on top of vSAN, such as MinIO and Scality. What is interesting about ECS is that not only can it provide you with an S3 object…
Regular readers will be aware that I “dabble” from time to time in the world of Cloud Native Apps. For me, a lot of this dabbling is trying to figure out how I can go about providing persistent storage to container based applications. Typically this in the shape of container volumes that are carved out of the underlying storage infrastructure, whether that is VMFS, NFS, vSAN or even Virtual Volumes. VMware Project Hatchway has enabled me to do this on multiple occasions. Project Hatchway was officially announced at VMworld 2017, but I’ve been working with this team since the early…
I was discussing the following situation with some of our field staff today. We are aware that snapshots inherit the same policies as the base VMDK, so if I deployed a VM as a RAID-6, RAID-5, or a RAID-1, snapshots inherit the same configuration. However if I have a host failure in a 6-node vSAN running RAID-6 VMs, or a failure in a 4-node vSAN running RAID-5, or a 3-node vSAN running RAID-1, and I try to take a snapshot, then vSAN does not allow me to take the snapshot as there are not enough hosts in the cluster to…
After last week’s post of Minio running on top of vSAN to provide an S3 object store, a number of folks said that I should also check out Scality S3 server. After a bit of research, it seems that Scality S3 server is akin to the CloudServer from Zenko.io. I “think” Zenko CloudServer is an umbrella for a few different projects, one of which is the S3server. In fact, clicking on the GitHub link on the Zenko.io CloudServer page takes me to the Scality/S3 page. Anyway, let’s look at how to set this up. I’m not going to repeat all…
While we are always looking at what other data services vSAN could provide natively, at the present moment, there is no native way to host S3 compatible storage on vSAN. After seeing the question about creating an S3 object store on vSAN raised a few times now, I looked into what it would take to have an S3 compatible store running on vSAN. A possible solution, namely Minio, was brought to my attention. While this is by no means an endorsement of Minio, I will admit that it was comparatively easy to get it deployed. Since the Minio Object Store…