In my last post, I showed some of the new command line functionality associated with deploying out a new Virtual Container Host (VCH) with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). I also highlighted how VIC now includes both Admiral for container orchestration via templates and the harbor registry is used for storing docker images. Harbor hosts docker images and Admiral hosts templates. An Admiral template describes how docker images hosted on Harbor gets instantiated (Kudos again to Massimo for this explanation). In my last post, I showed how I finally managed to deploy my VCH. Now the idea was that I should…
VMware recently release vSphere Integrated Containers v1.1. I got an opportunity recently to give it a whirl. While I’ve done quite a bit of work with VIC in the past, a number of things have changed, especially in the command line. What I’ve decided to do in the post is highlight some of the new command line options that are necessary to deploy the VCH, the Virtual Container Host. Once the VCH is deployed, at that point you have the docker API endpoint to start deploying your “containers as VMs”. Before diving into that however, I do want to clarify…
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…
I was looking at the layout of RAID-5 object configuration the other day, and while these objects were deployed on vSAN with 4 components, something caught my eye. It wasn’t the fact that there were 4 components, which is what one would expect since we implement RAID-5 as a 3+1, i.e. 3 data segments and 1 parity segment. No, what caught my eye was that one of the components had a different vote count. Now, RAID-5 and RAID-6 erasure coding configurations are not the same as RAID-1. With RAID-1, we deploy multiple copies of the data depending on how many…
Sorry about the wordy title but this is a question that has come up a number of times. The request is that when I have two data sites and deploy two stretched clusters across these data sites, can the other stretched cluster support the witness appliance for this stretched cluster, and vice-versa? The answer is no, and I will explain why in this post.
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.
I recently noticed a blog post describing some very strange behaviors in 2-node and 3-node vSAN clusters. I was especially concerned to read that when they introduced a failure and then fixed that failure, they did not experience any auto-recovery. I have reached out to the authors of the post, just to check out some things such as version of vSAN, type of failure, etc. Unfortunately I haven’t had a response as yet, but I did feel compelled to put the record straight. In the following post, I am going to introduce a variety of operations and failures in my…