Most readers will be aware that vSAN version 6.7U1 was recently released. For those of you who wish to know more about the release, I wrote this blog article last month detailing the new features. In this post I want to cover an item which many of you may not be aware of. It is a new feature which makes the most common vSAN advanced options visible and configurable in the vSphere UI. There are 3 advanced options which we have surfaced up. The first is the VSAN.ClomRepairDelay timer which is the delay used before rebuilding ABSENT components. The second…
At this year’s VMworld, I was very fortunate to have 3 of my submitted sessions accepted for both VMworld in Las Vegas and again for VMworld in Barcelona. Not only that, but I got the opportunity to present with my friends and colleagues, Christos, Duncan and Paudie. The sessions that I presented in both Las Vegas and Barcelona were as follows: HCI1246BE – Optimizing vSAN for Performance with Paudie O’Riordan HCI1270BE – The Power of Storage Policy-Based Management with Duncan Epping HCI1338BE – vSAN: An Ideal Storage Platform for Kubernetes-controlled Cloud-Native Apps with Christos Karamanolis These have now been re-recorded…
At VMworld 2018, we announced an initiative to use EBS, Amazon Elastic Block Store, for vSAN storage. At present vSAN is configured using the current EC2 i3 configurations, which run ESXi on bare-metal. I have seen these referred to as i3p, but my understanding is that they correlate to the i3.metal instances as shown here. The Amazon EC2 i3 instances include Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD-based instance storage. These are configured with 10TB of storage per host, but there are some limitations. For one, if you wish to expand on capacity, you need to add another complete EC2 i3 instance.…
I had someone reach out to me recently, asking for a way to change the policy on a file that was uploaded to a vSAN datastore, e.g. an ISO image. When a file is uploaded to the vSAN datastore, a VM Home namespace object is created. It is into this ‘file system’ type object that the files/ISOs are stored. Initially, I looked at ways to change the VM Home namespace. I looked at various commands to change the policy and I did find some in RVC, the Ruby vSphere Console. Unfortunately all the spbm.namespace_change commands look for a VM as…
Yesterday, we saw the announcement that VMware has release vSphere 6.7U1. This includes new releases of vCenter Server 6.7U1, ESXi 6.7U1 and of course vSAN 6.7U1. All of the hyperlinks here will take you to the release notes of that particular product. In this post, I just want to briefly run through some of the major enhancements that we have included in vSAN 6.7U1. TRIM/UNMAP Support Top of the list for me is the introduction of automated UNMAP support. Note that the key point here is that this is for in-guest space reclamation. vSAN has never had an issue with…
vSAN readers will most likely be aware that we introduced support for iSCSI on vSAN way back in vSAN 6.5. That is to say, we had the ability to create iSCSI targets and LUNs using vSAN objects, and present the LUNs to external iSCSI initiators. That release also supported Persistent Group Reservations (PGRs) but it did lack transparent failover. We followed this up with an enhancement in vSAN 6.7 which enabled transparent failover. This enabled support for features like Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) to work on iSCSI on vSAN, if using shared disk mode as it uses reservations on…
The content catalog has just gone live with the schedule of break-out sessions for VMworld 2018 in Barcelona. All three sessions that I presented in Las Vegas are also scheduled for the European event. I’m fortunate that I have a chance to co-present with my good friends and colleagues, Christos Karamanolis, Duncan Epping and Paudie O’Riordan. I hope you can make it along to one of these sessions if the topic is of interest.