Many of you who are well versed in vSAN will realize that we released a Secondary Failures To Tolerate (SFTT) feature with vSAN 6.6. This meant that not only could we tolerate failures across sites, but that we could also add another layer of redundancy to each copy of the data maintained at each of the data sites. Of course the cross site replication (now referred to as PFTT or Primary Failures To Tolerate) is still based on RAID-1 mirroring and this continues to require a third site for the witness appliance, so that quorum can be obtained in the…
All three of my sessions from VMworld 2017 are now available on slide share. Lots of folks have been asking me for the content, so this is the easiest way of making them accessible. I just want to say thanks once more to my great co-speakers/co-presenters. I’m grateful to Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage for helping me out on the Core Storage session, and kudos must also go to my colleagues and good pals Duncan Epping and Andreas Scherr, who co-presented on the vSAN Top 10 and vSAN Networking sessions respectively. Enjoy!
The last of my VMworld 2017 sessions is now available for viewing. This is the vSAN Networking session, which I co-presented with Andreas Scherr. Andreas is responsible for taking care of all of our vSAN proof-of-concept deployments in EMEA. In this session we cover many aspects of vSAN networking design and configuration, such as NIC teaming, load balancing, supported topologies, and so on. The session includes some very interesting demos, highlighting what can go wrong when the networking is not optimal. Hope you like it, and feedback is always welcome.
A quick note to let you know that a recorded version of the VMworld 2017 session “Top 10 things to know about vSAN” is now available on YouTube. I delivered this with my colleague, Duncan Epping and in this recording we talk about a bunch of things that we feel are important to know about vSAN, but which you may not be aware of. Hope you like it.
After publishing the vSAN Networking Guide earlier this year, Paudie O’Riordain and I received numerous questions regarding support on having different stretched clusters hosting each other’s witness appliances. These queries arose because we discussed a 2-node (ROBO) topology which allowed this to sort of configuration (i.e. the cross hosting of witnesses) via special request. But in the networking guide, we explicitly stated that this was not supported with vSAN stretched clusters. However, after some further testing by our engineering teams, we can now relax this restriction if there are 4 independent sites hosting the different stretched clusters. In this case,…
Last week, I was rolling out Horizon View v7.1 on my new vSAN 6.6.1 all-flash configuration in the lab. Now, one of the pet peeves a few of us have had with this configuration was that a warning was always reported around read cache reservations on all-flash vSAN. Of course, read cache is irrelevant to all-flash (AF) configurations as it does not use a read cache; this is only applicable to hybrid vSAN configurations. This is why it was such as annoyance.
Many regular readers will be aware of new encryption features added recently to VMware’s portfolio, such as vSAN data-at-reset encryption and vSphere VM encryption in vSphere 6.5. I had to return to a configuration task that I hadn’t done in a while, which was the deployment of a new Key Management Server (KMS) on my vSphere 6.5 / vSAN 6.6.1 setup. I had done this a few times before, but it has been a while and I’d forgotten what exactly I’d needed to do, so I decided to document the steps in this post for future reference. Those of you…