vSAN File Service & Kubernetes PVs with an implicit quota

Earlier this week, I participated in a customer call around vSAN File Service and Kubernetes Persistent Volumes. I have highlighted the dynamic Read-Write-Many Persistent Volume feature of our vSphere CSI driver in conjunction with vSAN File Service before. Read-Write-Many (RWX) volumes are volumes that can be accessed/shared by multiple containers. During the discussion, one question came up in relation to quota, and if it can be applied to Persistent Volumes which are backed by file shares from vSAN File Service, which is the purpose of this post. Now, for those of you who are familiar with vSAN File Service, you…

AND and OR Rules in Storage Policies

I was recently working in an environment where my vCenter server was managing two vSAN clusters, each with its own datastore. I wanted to be able to choose which datastore to provision to via storage policy, but came across some unexpected behaviour. When I configured my vSAN Rule and my Tag Rule, it seems that both datastores would appear as compliant to the policy. I found out the reason, and decided to write it up as I had never known this was how policies AND and OR rules behaved until now. Setting up Tags I created a Tags Category called…

vSAN 7.0 U2 – What’s new?

I know that there has been a lot of content already written in relation to the latest 7.0U2 release of vSAN. My good pal Duncan has done a considerable amount on work to highlight the new features, and has an excellent set of YouTube videos that you can review at your convenience. However, I thought I would create a bite-sized overview of some of the big ticket items that are in the vSAN 7.0U2 release, as many of my readers have asked me about some of these features in the past. I’m not covering all of the features, of which…

vSAN DPp – MinIO Object Store Supervisor Service [Video]

In this short video, I will demonstrate a new feature of vSphere with Tanzu, namely the vSAN Data Persistence platform. In this demo, we will show how easy it is to deploy a Supervisor Service using vSAN DPp. The service that we are deploying is MinIO, a provider of on-premises S3 Object Stores. We will see how to enable the Service, and then how to provision a dedicated S3 Object Store to a particular Namespace with vSphere with Tanzu. This means that a developer or a team of developers using a particular namespace can have their own dedicated S3 Object…

A first look at DPp (Data Persistence platform) and MinIO

Today I want to take a closer look at the new vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp). I mentioned that this was a key reason for updating my VMware Cloud Foundation environment to version 4.2, which officially released last week. One of the services included in DPp is the MinIO S3 compatible object store. Although I have written about MinIO a number of time on this site, the fact that it is now incorporated as a service in the new DPp makes it even easier to deploy than ever before. In this post, we will look at the steps involved in…

vSAN 7.0U1 – Object Format Health Warning after Disk Format v13 Upgrade

This is something I noticed on my own lab after applying the most recent disk format (version 13) to my vSAN 7.0U1 environment. I already described the new Capacity Management features in vSAN 7.0U1 in a previous post. One of these features in the new capacity reserve which dramatically lowers the slack space requirements, and which are now controlled by two new parameters, Operations Reserve and Host Rebuild Reserve. Slack space is the term we used for the amount of space that needed to be set aside for operations such as the reconfiguration of objects after a policy change, and…