I got a bit of a surprise a few weeks back when I noticed a register article by Chris Mellor stating that PrimaryIO (previously CacheBox) had announced a new cache acceleration I/O filter for vSphere. We first announced plans for VAIO (vSphere APIs for I/O Filters) back at VMworld 2014. VAIO allows VMware partners to plug their products/features directly into the VM I/O Path which in turn will give our customers access to 3rd party storage services/features like deduplication, compression, replication or encryption which may not be available on their storage array. Or in this case, a cache acceleration feature.…
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to meet with a number of VMware customers in both Singapore and in the UAE. Most of the sessions were enablement and education type sessions, where there was a lot of white-boarding of VSAN (VMware’s hyper-converged infrastructure product) and Virtual Volumes (VVols – Software Defined Storage or SDS for the storage arrays). This wasn’t a sales session; I’m not in sales. The objective of these sessions was simply to educate. I guess when you are immersed in this stuff 24×7, it easy to fall into the trap of believing that everyone is well…
In this post, I want to talk about a feature called Problematic Disk Handling. Some history behind why we have such a feature can be found in this post. In VSAN 6.2/vSphere 6.0 U2, Problematic Disk Handling has been improved so that it will unmount a problematic disk/diskgroup for two reasons:
There might be a reason in VSAN stretched cluster environments or in 2-node VSAN ROBO deployments to change the witness appliance. The one thing to keep in mind is that you must use a witness appliance that has the same on-disk format as the rest of the disk groups in the cluster. Right now, there is a 6.1 version of the appliance and a 6.2 version of the appliance, so make sure that you select the correct one. Replacing the current witness with a new witness is very straight forward, and the tasks can be summarized as follows: Deploy the…
This is an exercise that we ran through in our lab environment, and we thought that the steps would be useful to share here. By way of introduction, our 4 node cluster is split into a 2+2+1 configuration, where there are 2 ESXi hosts on site A (VLAN 4), 2 ESXi hosts on site B (VLAN 3), and a third site, site C (VLAN 80), hosting the witness appliance (nested ESXi host). All sites are connected over L3. In other words, static routes are added to each of the ESXi hosts so that ESXi hosts on site A can reach…
If you’ve been following my series on VSAN 6.2 blog posts, you’ll be aware of a considerable number of new features, especially around space efficiency, such as deduplication and compression. On top of this, there is a new on-disk format (v3) and a new software checksum mechanism. All of these features introduce some capacity overhead in their own right, so as to allow administrators track where the storage consumption is occurring a brand new capacity view has been introduced with VSAN 6.2.
Many seasoned VSAN administrators will know how heavily we rely on VSAN Observer to get an understanding of the underlying performance of VSAN. While VSAN Observer is a very powerful tool, it does have some drawbacks. For one, it does not provide historic performance data, it simply gives a real-time view of the state of the system as it is currently, not what it was like previously. VSAN Observer is also a separate tool and is not integrated with vSphere web client, thus you didn’t have a “single pane of glass” view of the system. The tool is also complex,…