This is something that I “spun my wheels” on a little bit last week, so I decided I’d write a short article to explain the issue in a bit more detail. This is related to the provisioning of a Persistent Volume on the Supervisor cluster of a vSphere with Kubernetes deployment. I had a local VMFS volume on one of my hosts, so I went ahead and tagged the volume using vSphere Tagging. I then built a tag-based storage policy so that when that policy is selected for provisioning, the objects that get provisioned would be placed on that local,…
Some time back, I looked at what it would take to run a container based Minio S3 object store on top of vSAN. This involved using our vSphere Docker Volume Server (aka Project Hatchway, and the details can be found here. However, I wanted to evaluate what it would take to scale out the Minio S3 object store on top of vSAN, paying particular attention to features like distribution and availability, and to examine the various data services that can be provided by both vSAN and Minio. I also wanted to take advantage of the new host-pinning feature in vSAN…
vSphere 6.5 saw the release of a number of improvements in the areas of DRS. I won’t detail all of the improvements here, since my colleague Brian Graf has done a great job of describing the features in a number of different blog posts. He discussed Network-Aware DRS here, Predictive DRS here and Proactive HA here. Instead, what I wanted to talk about in this post is how these features inter-operate with vSAN, if they do at all. I’ve been asked this question a few times now, so after reaching out to Brian and a number of resources on this…
vSAN 6.6 is finally here. This sixth iteration of vSAN is the quite a significant release for many reasons, as you will read about shortly. In my opinion, this may be the vSAN release with the most amount of new features. Let’s cut straight to the chase and highlight all the features of this next version of vSAN. There is a lot to tell you about. Now might be a good time to grab yourself a cup of coffee.
In a previous post, I talked about how vSphere HA is used extensively in VSAN Stretched Cluster. The primary purpose of vSphere HA is to restart virtual machines in the event of a failure. However to ensure that the restarted virtual machines continue to perform optimally, and to continue using a warmed cache, I mentioned that we need to use VM/Host affinity rules to achieve this. In this post I want to discuss the role of DRS and VM/Host affinity rules in more detail, and how they are used in VSAN stretched cluster.