Horizon View 7 on VSAN – Policies Revisited

It has been some time since I last looked at Horizon View on Virtual SAN. The last time was when we first released VSAN, back in the 5.5 days. This was with Horizon View 5.3.1, which was the first release that inter-operated with Virtual SAN. At the time, there was some funkiness with policies. View could only use the default policy at the time, and the default policy used to show up as “none” in the UI. The other issue is that you could not change the default policy via the UI, only through CLI commands. Thankfully, things have come…

VSAN 6.2 Part 12 – VSAN 6.1 to 6.2 Upgrade Steps

I’ve already written a few articles around this, notably on stretched cluster upgrades and on-disk format issues. In this post, I just wanted to run through the 3 distinct upgrade steps in a little more detail, and show you some useful commands that you can use to monitor the progress. In a nutshell, the steps are: Upgrade vCenter Server to 6.0U2 (VSAN 6.2) Upgrade ESXi hosts to ESXi 6.0U2 (VSAN 6.2) Perform rolling upgrade of on-disk format from V2 to V3 across all hosts

A closer look at the VSAN witness appliance

As part of the Virtual SAN 6.1 announcements at VMworld 2015, VMware announced two new, eagerly anticipated features. The first of these is VSAN stretched cluster, allowing you to protect your virtual machines across data centers, not just racks. And the second is 2-node VSAN, which will be an excellent solution for remote office/branch office (ROBO) configurations. To allow these configuration to work, a dedicated witness host is required. For those of you already familiar with VSAN,  a witness component is used in the event of a split brain to figure out if the virtual machine objects have a quorum.…

VAAI now available with vSphere Standard Edition

A short post today, but it highlights what I feel is an important enhancement to vSphere licensing. I’ve had lots of questions recently about why VAAI (Storage APIs for Array Integration) is not available in the standard edition of vSphere. This is especially true since I began posting about Virtual Volumes earlier this year, and it was clear that Virtual Volumes is available in the standard edition. One reason why this was confusing is that if a migration of a VVol could not be handled by the array using the VASA APIs, the migration would fall back to using VAAI…

vCenter Operations Manager – Caught out by new Solution Licensing step

In a few recent posts, I’ve been looking at performance counters in vSphere 5.1. One of my colleagues, Hugo Strydom, reached out to me about doing a vCenter Operations (vCOps) custom dashboard to monitor the new Storage I/O Control (SIOC) counters in vSphere 5.1 which I detailed here. Hugo has done a whole series of great blog posts on vCOps on his blog site. I thought it would really cool to get this setup on my environment and take a look.