Another of the break-out sessions that I presented at VMworld 2015 in San Francisco on Virtual SAN (VSAN) has been recorded and is now available on the VMworld site. I co-presented “STO6228 Monitoring and Troubleshooting Virtual SAN, Current and Future” with Christian Dickmann of VMware, who did the latter part of the session. I do the initial introduction, talking briefly about VSAN, and then the various tools that we now have for monitoring and troubleshooting. Christian then takes the stage to talk about how things have progressed over the past year, certain use cases and some future plans we have…
The more observant of you may have observed the following entry in the VSAN 6.1 Release Notes: Virtual SAN monitors solid state drive and magnetic disk drive health and proactively isolates unhealthy devices by unmounting them. It detects gradual failure of a Virtual SAN disk and isolates the device before congestion builds up within the affected host and the entire Virtual SAN cluster. An alarm is generated from each host whenever an unhealthy device is detected and an event is generated if an unhealthy device is automatically unmounted. The purpose of this post is to provide you with a little…
I’m delighted to say that the two sessions that I co-presented at VMworld in San Francisco last month are also going to be delivered at VMworld in Barcelona next month.
Datrium are a new storage company who only recently came out of stealth. They are one of the companies that I really wanted to catch up with at VMworld 2015. They have a lot of well-respected individuals on their team, including Boris Weissman, who was a principal engineer at VMware and Brian Biles of Data Domain fame. They also count of Diane Green, founder of VMware, among their investors. So there is a significant track record in both storage and virtualization at the company.
As part of the enhancements to Virtual SAN 6.1, stretched cluster support was announced. To provide availability for virtual machines in a VSAN Stretched Cluster, vSphere HA needs to be configured. This allows VMs to be restarted on the same site (with affinity rules) when there is a host failure, or restarted on the remote site when there is a complete site failure. However there are certain settings that need to be configured in a specific way that are fundamental to achieving high availability in a VSAN stretched cluster. In this post, I will call out the VMware recommended settings,…
In an earlier post, I described the witness appliance in a lot of detail. Using the witness appliance is VMware’s recommended way of creating a witness host. Ideally, customers should avoid building their own bespoke appliances for this purpose. Also note that the witness appliance is not a general purpose ESXi VM. It doesn’t store/run nested VMs, and it has no VM or HA/DRS related functions. It simply functions as a VSAN witness and plays no other role. In this post, I will take you through step by step instructions on how to deploy a witness appliance for either a…
As part of the Virtual SAN 6.1 announcements at VMworld 2015, VMware announced two new, eagerly anticipated features. The first of these is VSAN stretched cluster, allowing you to protect your virtual machines across data centers, not just racks. And the second is 2-node VSAN, which will be an excellent solution for remote office/branch office (ROBO) configurations. To allow these configuration to work, a dedicated witness host is required. For those of you already familiar with VSAN, a witness component is used in the event of a split brain to figure out if the virtual machine objects have a quorum.…