Essential VSAN kindle & ebook versions now available

Well, after almost 8 months of work, the VSAN book that I have been working on with Duncan Epping is finally available for general download. This is the first book I’ve written, and I’ll always be grateful for the guidance and mentoring I received from Duncan. I’m also extremely grateful to a number of people at VMware Press (Pearson) for their willingness to sponsor this project. There are also numerous people at VMware that deserve thanks for their input and support, and you’ll find them listed in the acknowledgements section of the book. We’re hopeful that this book will provide…

Heads Up! Patches now available for NFS APD Issue

Very quick update … Many readers will be aware of an ongoing issue with NFS in ESXi 5.5U1. My colleague, Duncan, wrote an article about it on his blog site recently entitled – Alert: vSphere 5.5 & NFS issue. Essentially, your NFS datastore may experience an APD (All Paths Down) condition. The issue is also described in KB article 2076392. I’m pleased to say that VMware has now produced a patch to address this issue. The patch is 5.5EP4 (June 2014) and can be downloaded from VMware’s patch repository site here and will address this issue. Search on ESXi (Embedded…

Introduction to vCloud Hybrid Services (vCHS) – Disaster Recovery (DR)

I just recently received my credentials to VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Services. One of the first things I was interested in testing out was the Disaster Recovery Service, which uses VMware’s vSphere Replication technology to protect VMs in your on-premise DC to vCHS. The following post provides the steps to configure the replication target as your vCHS VDC (virtual data center), and then configuring replication on a VM.

vSphere Web Client Short Cuts

Every once in a while, you learn about something that is kind of neat. In some conversations with our UI team, I recently learnt about a few cool vSphere Web Client short cuts to jump to between different views. Ctrl + Alt + 1 = Go to Home View Ctrl + Alt + 2 = Go to vCenter Home View Ctrl + Alt + 3 = Go to the Hosts & Clusters View Ctrl + Alt + 4 = Got to the VM & Templates View Ctrl + Alt + 5 = Got to the Datastores View Ctrl + Alt…

EMC World 2014 Highlights (abridged)

Although I didn’t attend EMC World this year, there were a lot of interesting announcements. I managed to catch up with Matt Cowger (who sorts of sits between both the EMC & VMware camps) and ran through some of the main highlights from this year’s conference. There has been a lot written about EMC World already (and I mean a lot) so I’m going to try to keep the highlights to a minimum, and provide links to where you can read more.

VSAN Part 25 – How many hosts needed to tolerate failures?

This is a question that has come up a number of times. Many of you will now be familiar with the VM Storage Policy capability Number Of Failures To Tolerate for VSAN, which defines how many failures can occur in the VSAN cluster and still provide a full copy of the data to allow a virtual machine to remain available. In this short post, I will explain how many physical ESXi hosts you need to accommodate the Number of Failures To Tolerate requirement in the VM Storage Policy.

VSAN Part 24 – Why is VSAN deploying thick disks?

In this post, we talk about a particular behaviour with using the default (or None) policy with VSAN. I have stated many times in the past that when a VM is deployed on the VSAN datastore, it behaves like it is thinly provisioned unless the capability ‘Object Space Reservation’ (OSR) is specified in the VM Storage Policy. The OSR will pre-allocate space on the VSAN datastore for the virtual machine’s storage objects, and is specified as a percentage of the actual VMDK size. However, there is a slightly different behaviour when the default policy is used. Once again, I was…