Before I get into this post, I do want to highlight that you probably will not do this in any production type environment. The reason why I implemented this, and how this post came about, is because I was helping out with our new edition of the VSAN 6.2. Hands-On-Lab (which should be available imminently by the way). Part of the lab involved demonstrating checksum functionality. Since VSAN has a distributed architecture, there was a requirement to run commands on different hosts. Rather than having lab participants input the password each and every time to run a command on the…
Last week I wrote a post on Horizon View 7 on VSAN. That was all about showing the policies that were associated with the different desktops that can be deployed. I did mention that while one could use vmFork/Instant Clones for desktops, they did not include any sort of persistence. I did add a caveat to say that you could provide persistent storage to these desktops using App Volumes. In this post, I wanted to give some details on App Volumes, and the different moving components one will need if they want to deploy View desktops with App Volumes. However,…
There has been a lot of news recently about the availability of vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) v0.1 on GitHub. VMware has being doing a lot of work around containers, container management and the whole area of cloud native applications over the last while. While many of these projects cannot be discussed publicly there are two projects that I am going to look at here : Photon OS – a minimal Linux container host designed to boot extremely quickly on VMware platforms. vSphere Integrated Containers – a way to deploy containers on vSphere. This allows developers to create applications using containers,…
It has been some time since I last looked at Horizon View on Virtual SAN. The last time was when we first released VSAN, back in the 5.5 days. This was with Horizon View 5.3.1, which was the first release that inter-operated with Virtual SAN. At the time, there was some funkiness with policies. View could only use the default policy at the time, and the default policy used to show up as “none” in the UI. The other issue is that you could not change the default policy via the UI, only through CLI commands. Thankfully, things have come…
I’ve already written a few articles around this, notably on stretched cluster upgrades and on-disk format issues. In this post, I just wanted to run through the 3 distinct upgrade steps in a little more detail, and show you some useful commands that you can use to monitor the progress. In a nutshell, the steps are: Upgrade vCenter Server to 6.0U2 (VSAN 6.2) Upgrade ESXi hosts to ESXi 6.0U2 (VSAN 6.2) Perform rolling upgrade of on-disk format from V2 to V3 across all hosts
A number of customers have reported experiencing difficulty when attempting to upgrade the on-disk format on VSAN 6.2. The upgrade to vSphere 6.0u2 goes absolutely fine; it is only when they try to upgrade the on-disk format, to use new features such as Software Checksum, and Deduplication and Compression, that they encounter this error. Here is a sample screenshot of the sort of error that is thrown by VSAN: One thing I do wish to call out – administrators must use the VSAN UI to upgrade the on-disk format. Do not simply evacuate a disk group, remove it and recreate…
In the VSAN 6.0 Design & Sizing Guide, a caveat was placed around the size of a VMDK, and the Number of Failures to Tolerate (FTT) number. It reads like this: “If the VMDK size is greater than 16TB, then the maximum value for NumberOfFailuresToTolerate is 1.” I’m pleased to say that this restriction has been lifted in VSAN 6.2.