Some time back I wrote about proactive rebalancing, a new feature of VSAN 6.0. However I have had a number of queries recently about its functionality. The most common query is that when the proactive rebalance operation is started, there doesn’t appear to be any rebuild/resync activity, even though the command output lists a number of disks that need to be rebalanced (rebalancing moves components between physical disks so that each disk is equally consumed).
This is another nice new feature of Virtual SAN 6.0. It basically is a directive to VSAN to start re-balancing components belonging to virtual machine objects around all the hosts and all the disks in the cluster. Why might you want to do this? Well, it’s very simple. As VMs are deployed on the VSAN datastore, there are algorithms in place to place those components across the cluster in a balanced fashion. But what if a hosts was placed into maintenance mode, and you requested that the data on the host be evacuated prior to entering maintenance mode, and now…