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…
As many regular readers will be aware, I’ve spent a bit of time in the past looking at how vSphere resources are consumed by Kubernetes objects, when Kubernetes is deployed as a set of virtual machines on top of vSphere infrastructure. While much of this is visible in the vSphere client, I’m focused on how to see this vSphere resource consumption from within Kubernetes. If I am working in Kubernetes, I’d rather not context switch out to the vSphere client just to see how much storage is left on a datastore or how much CPU and Memory is left on…
One of the new, exciting features in vSAN 7.0U1 is the extension to vSAN File Service. As well as supporting NFS v3 & v4.1, we now also support SMB (Server Message Block) protocols v2 & v3. This protocol is commonly associated with Windows File Shares. In this post, I will go through the new configuration steps, and then we shall present the new created SMB file share to a Windows desktop. One of the new prerequisites, which wasn’t needed with NFS file shares, is that Active Directory integration is required for SMB. We will see this new step during the…
I’ve spent a lot of time recently on creating and building out vSphere with Tanzu environment, with the goal of deploying a Tanzu Kubernetes “guest” cluster. I frequently used the kubectl-vsphere command to logout of the Supervisor namespace context and login to the Guest cluster context. This allowed me to start deploying stateful and stateful apps in my Tanzu Kubernetes Guest cluster. I thought no more about this step until a recent conversation with my colleague Frank Denneman. He queried whether or not Kubernetes developers would actually have vSphere privileges to do this. It was a great question which led…
With the release of vSAN 7.0U1, a major change was made with regards to what was termed “slack space” requirements. This basically referred to how much space should be set aside on the vSAN datastore for operational and rebuild purposes. I have had a few queries about this recently, so I thought I would take the opportunity to highlight some of the capacity management features now available in vSAN. This would also be a good time to revisit the advanced options for Automatic Rebalance, as well as discuss the Reactive Rebalance features that we have had in vSAN for some…
At VMworld 2019, I had the pleasure of presenting our business unit’s Spotlight session with our GM, John Gilmartin (you can watch the complete recording here). One of the topics that generated a lot of interest was a low-cost Disaster Recovery (DR) service. A lot has happened in the past year but most notably was the acquisition of Datrium. Merging the original goal of a low-cost DR as a Service (DRaaS) solution alongside the smarts acquired from Datrium, we are now almost at the point where we are ready to deliver a new VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery service to our…
In a previous video, we looked at the steps involved in enabling vSphere with Tanzu / Workload Management. That video concluded with the creation of a vSphere Namespace. In this video, we will demonstrate how to login to the namespace, how to create a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) ‘guest’ cluster via a simple manifest / YAML file, and then how to change contexts so that a developer can work in the context of the new TKG guest cluster. This video accompanies a more detailed write-up on deploying a TKG guest cluster in vSphere with Tanzu.