If you were wondering why my blogging has dropped off in recent months, wonder no more. I’ve been fully immersed in the next release of VSAN. Today VMware has just announced the launch of VSAN 6.2, the next version of VMware’s Virtual SAN product. It is almost 2.5 years since we launched the VSAN beta at VMworld 2013, and almost 2 years to the day since we officially GA’ed our first release of VSAN way back in March 2014. A lot has happened since then, with 3 distinct releases in that 2 year period (6.0, 6.1 and now 6.2). For…
I’m delighted to say that I have been invited to present at the next Singapore VMUG Usercon, which will take place in the Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel on Tuesday, March 1st, 2016. I will be using the opportunity to present on Virtual SAN (VSAN) and will be sharing lots of news and information about the upcoming features that we have planned. It would seem that I am one of the first speakers of the day, so I will have a lot of free time later in the morning and in the afternoon if anyone would like to talk about VMware,…
We are hearing about a number of VSAN stretched cluster implementations going on at the moment, which is great news. I just set up such a configuration once again in my lab as we look at some various scenarios for the next release of VSAN. Now, for anyone looking at implementing VSAN stretched cluster, there is the VSAN 6.1 stretched cluster guide which should be your first port of call. However I noticed that once VSAN stretched cluster is implemented, you get a few warnings that you typically wouldn’t see in standard VSAN deployments. That is what I want to…
In the VSAN Troubleshooting Reference Manual, the following description of VSAN.ClomMaxComponentSizeGB is provided: By default VSAN.ClomMaxComponentSizeGB is set to 255GB. When Virtual SAN stores virtual machine objects, it creates components whose default size does not exceed 255 GB. If you use physical disks that are smaller than 255GB, then you might see errors similar to the following when you try to deploy a virtual machine: There is no more space for virtual disk XX. You might be able to continue this session by freeing disk space on the relevant volume and clicking retry.
Attention VSAN users. A new Log Insight content pack has just been released specifically for Virtual SAN. For those of you not familiar with Log Insight, this product does automated log management through log analytics, aggregation and search. It allows administrators to analyze terabytes of logs, perform smart parsing to discover structure in unstructured data, and enable interactive, real-time search and analytics through a GUI-based, easy to use interface.
A short post to let you know about some upcoming speaking engagements that I am doing over the next couple of weeks. First up, I will be speaking at the TechUG, or Technology User Group event next week. This event will be held on Thursday, November 26th. It will be held in the Westin Hotel in the heart of Dublin city, Ireland. There is a really good agenda for this event (which is not a VMware centric event), that you can find at this link here. I personally will be speaking about Virtual SAN (VSAN), VMware’s hyper-converged compute and storage…
This week I was in Berlin for our annual Tech Summit in EMEA. This is an event for our field folks in EMEA. I presented a number of VSAN sessions, including a design and sizing session. As part of that session, the topic of VSAN memory consumption was raised. In the past, we’ve only ever really talked about the host memory requirements for disk group configuration as highlighted in this post here. For example, as per the post, to a run a fully configured Virtual SAN system, with 5 fully populated disk groups per host, and 7 disks in each…