vSphere 6.5 saw the release of a number of improvements in the areas of DRS. I won’t detail all of the improvements here, since my colleague Brian Graf has done a great job of describing the features in a number of different blog posts. He discussed Network-Aware DRS here, Predictive DRS here and Proactive HA here. Instead, what I wanted to talk about in this post is how these features inter-operate with vSAN, if they do at all. I’ve been asked this question a few times now, so after reaching out to Brian and a number of resources on this…
I’m delighted to report that I’ve been invited to speak at the upcoming Norway VMUG (VMware User Group) meetings. These take place in three different cities over the week of May 29th (week 22), with three meetings in three days. On Tuesday, May 30th, the Oslo VMUG will take place. On May 31st, it’s the turn of the Trondheim VMUG and we will finish with the Bergen VMUG on June 1st. I am going to broaden the scope of the conversation at these VMUGs, and talk about Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) in general. Of course, we will look at…
I was looking at the layout of RAID-5 object configuration the other day, and while these objects were deployed on vSAN with 4 components, something caught my eye. It wasn’t the fact that there were 4 components, which is what one would expect since we implement RAID-5 as a 3+1, i.e. 3 data segments and 1 parity segment. No, what caught my eye was that one of the components had a different vote count. Now, RAID-5 and RAID-6 erasure coding configurations are not the same as RAID-1. With RAID-1, we deploy multiple copies of the data depending on how many…
Sorry about the wordy title but this is a question that has come up a number of times. The request is that when I have two data sites and deploy two stretched clusters across these data sites, can the other stretched cluster support the witness appliance for this stretched cluster, and vice-versa? The answer is no, and I will explain why in this post.
vSAN 6.6 is finally here. This sixth iteration of vSAN is the quite a significant release for many reasons, as you will read about shortly. In my opinion, this may be the vSAN release with the most amount of new features. Let’s cut straight to the chase and highlight all the features of this next version of vSAN. There is a lot to tell you about. Now might be a good time to grab yourself a cup of coffee.
I recently noticed a blog post describing some very strange behaviors in 2-node and 3-node vSAN clusters. I was especially concerned to read that when they introduced a failure and then fixed that failure, they did not experience any auto-recovery. I have reached out to the authors of the post, just to check out some things such as version of vSAN, type of failure, etc. Unfortunately I haven’t had a response as yet, but I did feel compelled to put the record straight. In the following post, I am going to introduce a variety of operations and failures in my…
I’ve recently been involved in some design and sizing for very large VMDKs on vSAN. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when doing this, not just the overhead when deciding to go with RAID1, RAID5 or RAID6, but also what this means for component counts. In the following post, I have done a few tests with some rather large RAID-5 and RAID-6 VMDKs, just to show you how we deal with it in vSAN. If you are involved in designing and sizing vSANs for large virtual machines, you might find this interesting.