Which policy changes can trigger a rebuild on vSAN?

Some time ago, I wrote about which policy changes can trigger a rebuild of an object. This came up again recently, as it was something that Duncan and I covered in our VMworld 2017 session on top 10 vSAN considerations. In the original post (which is over 3 years old now), I highlighted items like increasing the stripe width, growing the read cache reservation (relevant only to hybrid vSAN) and changing FTT when the read cache reservation is non-zero (again only relevant to hybrid vSAN) which led to a rebuild of the object (or components within the object). The other…

VSAN 6.2 Part 7 – Capacity Views

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.

VSAN 6.2 Part 3 – Software Checksum

This next part of the VSAN 6.2 series of posts focuses on an important feature which many customer have been requesting. VSAN 6.2 introduces another new feature, end-to-end software checksum, to help customers avoid data integrity issues arising due to problems on the underlying storage media. In VSAN 6.2, checksum is enabled by default, but may be enabled or disabled on per virtual machine/object basis via VM storage policies. Checksum is enabled by default as we feel customers will always want to leverage this great new feature. The only reason one might disable it is if the application already has…

An overview of the new Virtual SAN 6.2 features

If you were wondering why my blogging has dropped off in recent months, wonder no more. I’ve been fully immersed in the next release of VSAN. Today VMware has just announced the launch of VSAN 6.2, the next version of VMware’s Virtual SAN product. It is almost 2.5 years since we launched the VSAN beta at VMworld 2013, and almost 2 years to the day since we officially GA’ed our first release of VSAN way back in March 2014. A lot has happened since then, with 3 distinct releases in that 2 year period (6.0, 6.1 and now 6.2). For…