Hmm, it seems to be the week that’s in it for storage issues. After publishing the DELL EQL & VMFS issue earlier this week, I have now been given a heads-up on an EMC VNXe & iSCSI issue. The symptoms are ESXi hosts being unable to boot from an iSCSI LUN on the VNXe or ESXi hosts losing connectivity to iSCSI datastores.
Our GSS folks just released KB article 2049103 which details a VMFS Heartbeat and Lock corruption issue that manifests itself on DELL EqualLogic storage arrays when running PS Series firmware v6.0.6. As per the KB: A VMFS datastore has a region designated for heartbeat types of operations to ensure that distributed access to the volume occurs safely. When files are being updated, the heartbeat region for those files is locked by the host until the update is complete. In this scenario, the heartbeat region has become corrupt.
As part of my storage vendors to check out at VMworld 2013 in San Francisco, one of the vendors I really wanted to catch up with was SanDisk and to learn more about their FlashSoft product. FlashSoft are run as the software division of SanDisk. In August 2012, they released version 3.0 of their I/O acceleration software, compatible with vSphere 5.0. In April 2013, they released version 3.1 which works with vSphere 5.0 & 5.1. I caught up with a number of folks from the FlashSoft team at VMworld 2013 to learn more about their product, and what their plans…
Hey all, its been a while since I put out anything that was non-VMware related. Actually, looking back, it was during the run up to VMworld. Well, this time of year is usually busy for us at VMware, especially with the vSphere 2013 (5.5) announcement and subsequent release and Virtual SAN going into beta. There have been a few things happening in the flash world over recent weeks so lets recap on some of those.
Regular readers will know that I’ve spent a lot of time recently posting around VSAN. But VSAN wasn’t the only announcement at VMworld 2013. We also announced the next release of vSphere – version 5.5. I now want to share with you a number of new storage enhancements which we have made in this latest release of vSphere. To begin with, we will look at a long-awaited feature, namely the ability to have virtual machine disk files that are larger than 2TB, the traditional maximum size of VMDKs.
This is quite a unique aspect of VSAN, and plays directly into what I believe to be one of the crucial factors of software defined storage. Its probably easier to use an example to explain the concept of how being able to change storage policies on the fly is such a cool feature. Let’s take a scenario where an administrator has deployed a VM with the default VM storage policy, which is that the VM Storage objects should have no disk striping and should tolerate one failure.The layout of the VM could look something like this: The admin then notices…
In this next post, I will examine some failure scenarios. I will concentrate of ESXi host failures, but suffice to say that a disk or network failure can also have consequences for virtual machines running on VSAN. There are two host failure scenarios highlighted below which can impact a virtual machine running on VSAN: An ESXi host, on which the VM is not running but has some of its storage objects, suffers a failure An ESXi host, on which the VM is running, suffers a failure Let’s look at these failures in more detail.