We had an interesting event happen on one of our lab servers this weekend. One of the hosts in our four node cluster hit an issue, which meant that the storage on that host was no longer available to the VSAN datastore. Since VSAN auto-heals, it attempted to re-protect as many VMs as possible. However, since we chose to ignore one of the health check warnings to do with limits, we ended up with a full VSAN datastore.
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,…
With the release of vSphere 6.0 earlier this year, VMware introduced the eagerly anticipated VVols or Virtual Volumes. As we see more and more traction around VVols, a specific question has come up a number of times already. The question is basically: “What happens to VVols if I lose my VASA Provider or my vCenter Server, or indeed both of these components? Will I still have access to my devices?”.
I already wrote an article on the NexentaConnect for VSAN product after seeing it in action at VMworld last year. More recently, I had the opportunity to play with it in earnest. Rather than giving you the whole low-down on NexentaConnect, instead I will use this post to show the steps involved in presenting a file share built by NexentaConnect to a VM. In this case, the VM and the file share both reside on Virtual SAN. I will also show you how to simply revert to a point-in-time snapshot of the file share using NexentaConnect. To answer the common…
I hadn’t realized that we had now begun to use the LVM (Logical Volume Manager) in our vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) version 6.0. Of course, I found out the hard way after a network outage in our lab brought down our VCSA which was running on NFS. On reboot, the VCSA complained about file system integrity as follows:
Today VMware announces the Virtual SAN 6.0 Health Check Plugin, a feature that will check your Virtual SAN configuration, both proactively and re-actively, and highlight any abnormal conditions found in the cluster. This is available to all our VSAN customers right now. Not only does it check the health of the cluster, but it also checks the state of the network, host connectivity, physical disk status, and underlying virtual machine object state. This is a great tool for ensuring that an initial deployment of VSAN or proof-of-concept has been rolled out successful, giving you confidence in your VSAN deployment. It…
Earlier this week I spoke about our efforts to failover vCenter Operations Manager (vCops) between two sites. In that article I stated that we used vApp containers at DR site, and added vApp variables to the Analytics and UI VMs at the recovery site. While this was painstaking to set up initially, it did provide us with the ability to failover vCops seamlessly to the DR site, with the vApp VMs inheriting their network settings via the vApp construct. At the end of that post, I mentioned a KB article, 2031891, which discusses the DR of vCops using IP Customization…