Taking snapshots with vSAN with failures in the cluster

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…

A closer look at Scality S3 running on vSAN

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.

A closer look at Minio S3 running on vSAN

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…

Upcoming VMUG webinar – vSphere 6.5 Core Storage

A quick note to let you know that I am co-presenting on an upcoming VMUG webinar with my good pal, Cody Hosterman, from Pure Storage. The subject is vSphere 6.5 Core Storage, and this is very much the same topic that we presented at VMworld 2017. We will cover new limits, deed dive into VMFS-6 and VAAI enhancements (including automated UNMAP), cover what’s new in NFS and iSCSI, and then finish with an overview of what we’ve done in the NVMe space. The webinar takes place on Thursday, November 16, 2017 at 11:00 AM US Central Standard Time. Cody and…

Preventing selection of certain datastores with SPBM

One of the great things about presenting at VMware User Group meetings is actually talking to customers and finding out about what their pain points are, and how  VMware can improve on our products and features. At the most recent VMUG I attended (in Poland), I was asked a question about storage policies, and if there was a way to  allow some users to use some policies, and other users to use a different policy. Unfortunately there is no permissions associated with policies at this time, so any user can select any policy. With that in mind, I had a…

Does Storage vMotion rename Virtual Volumes also?

I had another question recently about whether or not the Storage vMotion behaviour of renaming VM files on a VMFS or NFS datastore also worked with Virtual Volumes or VVols? After a quick test, I can state categorically that the answer is yes. I created a VM on a Nimble Storage appliance, presented two unique storage containers (aka virtual volume datastores), deployed a test VM on one of the VVol datastores, and then renamed the VM in the vSphere web client. I then verified that the VM name in the vSphere client was different to the names of its files…

Guest OS space reuse on vSAN

This post came about after a brief discussion with my pal, Lee Dilworth. Although the outcome of this test has really nothing to do with vSAN, the behaviour was observed on certain Guest OS which were running on vSAN. I guess the first thing that needs to be made clear is that there is no support for in-guest UNMAP (or TRIM) for VMs running on vSAN at this time, although it is something we are examining very closely. So with this in mind, we had feedback to say that a test being run as part of a proof-of-concept was showing…