Today VMware announces the Virtual SAN 6.0 Health Check Plugin, a feature that will check your Virtual SAN configuration, both proactively and re-actively, and highlight any abnormal conditions found in the cluster. This is available to all our VSAN customers right now. Not only does it check the health of the cluster, but it also checks the state of the network, host connectivity, physical disk status, and underlying virtual machine object state. This is a great tool for ensuring that an initial deployment of VSAN or proof-of-concept has been rolled out successful, giving you confidence in your VSAN deployment. It…
The more astute of you who have already moved to vSphere 6.0, and like looking at CLI outputs, may have observed some new columns/fields in the PSA claimrules when you run the following command: # esxcli storage core claimrule list –claimrule-class=VAAI The new fields are as follows (slide right to view full output): XCOPY Use Array XCOPY Use XCOPY Max Reported Values Multiple Segments Transfer Size ————— —————– ————– false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false false 0 false …
I had a few queries recently on how Virtual Volumes (VVols) worked with vSphere HA. In particular, I had a number of questions around whether or not VVol datastores could be used as a heartbeat datastore by vSphere HA. The answer is yes, the VVol datastore can be used for vSphere HA datastore heartbeating. If you want to see how, please read on. I think these queries may have arisen due to the fact that we do not use datastore heartbeating with Virtual SAN (VSAN). Just by way of reminder, the master host in a vSphere HA cluster uses a…
This is another nice new feature of Virtual SAN 6.0. It basically is a directive to VSAN to start re-balancing components belonging to virtual machine objects around all the hosts and all the disks in the cluster. Why might you want to do this? Well, it’s very simple. As VMs are deployed on the VSAN datastore, there are algorithms in place to place those components across the cluster in a balanced fashion. But what if a hosts was placed into maintenance mode, and you requested that the data on the host be evacuated prior to entering maintenance mode, and now…
One of the really nice new features of VSAN 6.0 is fault domains. Previously, there was very little control over where VSAN placed virtual machine components. In order to protect against something like a rack failure, you may have had to use a very high NumberOfFailuresToTolerate value, resulting in multiple copies of the VM data dispersed around the cluster. With VSAN 6.0, this is no longer a concern as hosts participating in the VSAN Cluster can be placed in different failure domains. This means that component placement will take place across failure domains and not just across hosts. Let’s look…
I’ve been hit up this week by a number of folks asking about “ATS Miscompare detected between test and set HB images” messages after upgrading to vSphere 5.5U2 and 6.0. The purpose of this post is to give you some background on why this might have started to happen. First off, ATS is the Atomic Test and Set primitive which is one of the VAAI primitives. You can read all about VAAI primitives in the white paper. HB is short for heartbeat. This is how ownership of a file (e.g VMDK) is maintained on VMFS, i.e. lock. You can read…
There have been a number of queries around Virtual Volumes (VVols) and replication, especially since the release of KB article 2112039 which details all the interoperability aspects of VVols. In Q1 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware Products are interoperable with Virtual Volumes (VVols)?” The response includes “VMware vSphere Replication 6.0.x”. In Q2 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware Products are currently NOT interoperable with Virtual Volumes (VVols)?” The response includes “VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.x to 6.0.x” In Q4 of the KB, the question is asked “Which VMware vSphere 6.0.x features are…