There has been a lot of discussion in the past around supported topologies for 2-node vSAN, specifically around where we can host the witness. Now my good pal Duncan has already highlighted some of this in his blog post here, but the questions continue to come up about where I can, and where I cannot place the witness for a 2-node vSAN deployment. I also want to highlight that many of these configuration considerations are covered by our official documentation. For example, there is the very comprehensive VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 for Remote Office and Branch Office Deployment Reference Architecture…
Last month we announced the release of a new vROps Management Pack specifically for vSAN. Previously the vSAN Management Pack was bundled with the MPSD – Management Pack for Storage Devices. I wrote about this when it entered beta, way back in 2015. Well, for those customers who are only interested in monitoring vSAN, and didn’t want all the other parts of the MPSD, the new vSAN Management Pack is now a stand-alone offering, so no MPSD required. This new vSAN Management Pack focuses on 3 main areas of vSAN: (1) Health and Availability, (2) Performance Analysis and (3) Capacity…
The first email I saw this morning in my inbox was from my good pal, Alan Renouf. Alan is our product line manager for APIs, SDKs, CLIs and Automation Frameworks (congrats on the promotion Alan). Anyway, Alan was announcing the General Availability of VMware vSphere PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1. There are a whole bunch of improvements in this release, and much kudos must go to the PowerCLI team. However from a vSAN perspective, things look really cool. [Update] This version of PowerCLI also works with vSAN 6.2 and 6.0, so there is no need for customers to upgrade to vSAN…
What a VMworld this has been for VSAN. The building momentum of this product is awesome to see, especially for those of us who have been evangelizing it from the beginning. The conversations have changed significantly this year. Previously it was all about “Why should I use VSAN?”. Now that the benefits of VSAN are obvious, the conversations this year were more technical and more around enablement, e.g. “How would I achieve X with VSAN, what are the points I need to consider when I use VSAN for Y, etc?”. As I mentioned in a previous post, this year I…
As many regular reader will be aware, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently on VMware’s Cloud Native App solutions. This is due to an internal program available to VMware employees called a Take-3. A Take-3 is where employees can take 3 months out of their current role and try a new challenge in another part of the company. Once we launched VSAN 6.2 earlier this year, I thought this would be an opportune time to try something different. Thanks to the support from the management teams in both my Storage and Availability BU (SABU) and the Cloud Native…
In some earlier post, I provided instructions on how one could deploy Kubernetes (K8S) on Photon Controller using the built-in photon controller CLI. In this next post, I want to show you how Kubernetes can be deployed natively, using kube-up and kube-down, on Photon Controller v0.9. In this example I am using Photon OS, a minimal Linux container host, optimized to run on vSphere (and other VMware products). Now in order to deploy K8S, a number of additional tooling needs to be added to Photon OS. The requirements are highlighted in this earlier blog post. Once all the necessary components…
I took another opportunity this week to look at our new Docker Volume Driver for vSphere which is currently in tech preview. This time I wanted to see how it behaved on Virtual SAN (VSAN). What I wanted to do is query the layout of the VMDK storage object on VSAN, and how an administrator can query its layout from vCenter server, but also from RVC, the Ruby vSphere Console. There might be a situation where you need to to query this information. My colleague, Wiliam Lam, has already added some information about how you can deploy volumes with different…