I had a very interesting question recently about how vSAN handles a failure in an object that is running with an erasure coding configuration. In the case of vSAN this is either a RAID-5 or a RAID-6. On vSAN, a RAID-5 is implemented with 3 data segments and 1 parity segment (3+1), with parity striped across all four components. RAID-6 is implemented as 4 data segments and 2 parity segments (4+2), again with the parity striped across all of the six components. Now, on vSAN, RAID-5 requires 4 physical ESXi hosts for implementation, with each host backing one set of…
After just deploying the newest version of Pivotal Container Services (PKS) and rolling out my first Kubernetes cluster (read all about it here), I wanted to try to do something a bit more interesting than just create another persistent volume claim to test out our vSphere Cloud Provider since I had done this a number of times already. Thanks to some of the work I have been doing with our cloud native team, I was introduced to StatefulSets. That peaked my interest a little, as I had not come across them before.
A very quick heads-up to let you know about an issue some of us experienced with vSAN 6.7U1 and about how to resolve it. We noticed that after upgrading to vSAN 6.7U1, the new Capacity History view did not work. However brand new installs of 6.7U1 worked just fine. The error that one gets from trying to look at the capacity history is “Unable to query charts data for capacity history” as shown below: I’m pleased to report that we have a solution for this issue already. It was caused by an inability to update the database schema in the…
It is almost 6 months since I last rolled out a deployment of Pivotal Container Service (PKS). I just did a new deployment this week using some of the more later builds of Pivotal Operations Manager (v2.3), and PKS (v1.2.2) and noticed a number of changes. This post is to take you through those changes and highlight where things are different and might catch you out. I am not going to go through all of the requirements from scratch – there are a number of posts already available which explain the command line tools that you need, and so on.…
A First Class Disk (FCD), also referred to as Improved Virtual Disk (IVDs), is one of the more recent features in vSphere that may have escaped your notice. FCDs were created to address a particular gap that we have in vSphere at this time. We are well aware that within a vSphere environment, it is currently very difficult to manage virtual disks unless they are associated with a virtual machine. A simple example would be snapshots. Snapshots work at a per VM basis, and to only snapshot a single VMDK rather than all VMDK attached to a VM involves a…
At this year’s VMworld, I was very fortunate to have 3 of my submitted sessions accepted for both VMworld in Las Vegas and again for VMworld in Barcelona. Not only that, but I got the opportunity to present with my friends and colleagues, Christos, Duncan and Paudie. The sessions that I presented in both Las Vegas and Barcelona were as follows: HCI1246BE – Optimizing vSAN for Performance with Paudie O’Riordan HCI1270BE – The Power of Storage Policy-Based Management with Duncan Epping HCI1338BE – vSAN: An Ideal Storage Platform for Kubernetes-controlled Cloud-Native Apps with Christos Karamanolis These have now been re-recorded…
vSAN readers will most likely be aware that we introduced support for iSCSI on vSAN way back in vSAN 6.5. That is to say, we had the ability to create iSCSI targets and LUNs using vSAN objects, and present the LUNs to external iSCSI initiators. That release also supported Persistent Group Reservations (PGRs) but it did lack transparent failover. We followed this up with an enhancement in vSAN 6.7 which enabled transparent failover. This enabled support for features like Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) to work on iSCSI on vSAN, if using shared disk mode as it uses reservations on…