I’m a bit late in bringing this to your attention, but there is a potential issue with VASA storage providers disconnecting from vCenter resulting in no VSAN capabilities being visible when you try to create a VM Storage Policy. These storage providers (there is one on each ESXi host participating in the VSAN Cluster) provide out-of-band information about the underlying storage system, in this case VSAN. If there isn’t at least one of these providers on the ESXi hosts communicating to the SMS (Storage Monitoring Service) on vCenter, then vCenter will not be able to display any of the capabilities…
Well, after almost 8 months of work, the VSAN book that I have been working on with Duncan Epping is finally available for general download. This is the first book I’ve written, and I’ll always be grateful for the guidance and mentoring I received from Duncan. I’m also extremely grateful to a number of people at VMware Press (Pearson) for their willingness to sponsor this project. There are also numerous people at VMware that deserve thanks for their input and support, and you’ll find them listed in the acknowledgements section of the book. We’re hopeful that this book will provide…
I am extremely excited about this year’s VMworld. I’m participating is some really great sessions, and the Essential VSAN book which Duncan Epping and I have been working on for the past 7-8 months should be available too.
Very quick update … Many readers will be aware of an ongoing issue with NFS in ESXi 5.5U1. My colleague, Duncan, wrote an article about it on his blog site recently entitled – Alert: vSphere 5.5 & NFS issue. Essentially, your NFS datastore may experience an APD (All Paths Down) condition. The issue is also described in KB article 2076392. I’m pleased to say that VMware has now produced a patch to address this issue. The patch is 5.5EP4 (June 2014) and can be downloaded from VMware’s patch repository site here and will address this issue. Search on ESXi (Embedded…
I just recently received my credentials to VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Services. One of the first things I was interested in testing out was the Disaster Recovery Service, which uses VMware’s vSphere Replication technology to protect VMs in your on-premise DC to vCHS. The following post provides the steps to configure the replication target as your vCHS VDC (virtual data center), and then configuring replication on a VM.
I was involved in some conversations recently on how the VAAI UNMAP command behaved, and what were the characteristics which affected its performance. For those of you who do not know, UNMAP is our mechanism for reclaiming dead or stranded space from thinly provisioned VMFS volumes. Prior to this capability, the ESXi host had no way of informing the storage array that the space that was being previously consumed by a particular VM or file is no longer in use. This meant that the array thought that more space was being consumed than was actually the case. UNMAP, part of…
Every once in a while, you learn about something that is kind of neat. In some conversations with our UI team, I recently learnt about a few cool vSphere Web Client short cuts to jump to between different views. Ctrl + Alt + 1 = Go to Home View Ctrl + Alt + 2 = Go to vCenter Home View Ctrl + Alt + 3 = Go to the Hosts & Clusters View Ctrl + Alt + 4 = Got to the VM & Templates View Ctrl + Alt + 5 = Got to the Datastores View Ctrl + Alt…