In a post on the vSphere blog, I spoke about how to use maintenance mode. As a follow on request, a number of people asked me how they should safely shutdown a VSAN cluster. In this post, I will address that question and share my observations. On my three-node VSAN cluster, I had a number of virtual machines as well as a vApp running vCenter Operations Manager VMs. My first step was to shut down all virtual machines in my cluster.
In a few recent posts, I’ve been looking at performance counters in vSphere 5.1. One of my colleagues, Hugo Strydom, reached out to me about doing a vCenter Operations (vCOps) custom dashboard to monitor the new Storage I/O Control (SIOC) counters in vSphere 5.1 which I detailed here. Hugo has done a whole series of great blog posts on vCOps on his blog site. I thought it would really cool to get this setup on my environment and take a look.