There was a very interesting discussion on our internal forums here at VMware over the past week. One of our guys had built out a VSAN cluster, and everything looked good. However on attempting to deploy a virtual machine on the VSAN datastore, he kept hitting an error which reported that it “cannot complete file creation operation”. As I said, everything looked healthy. The cluster formed correctly, there were no network partitions and the network status was normal. So what could be the problem?
Maxta are another storage vendor that I managed to get talking to at this years’ VMworld conference in San Francisco. Although they were present at last year’s VMworld, they only announced themselves in earnest last November (11/12/13) with the release of the Maxta Storage Platform (MxSP). I spent some time with Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, Director of PM & PMM at Maxta, and he was very open in sharing details on the Maxta product. If you read the blurb on Maxta on the VMworld sponsor/exhibitor list, it states that they eliminate the need for storage arrays, provide enterprise class data services and…
It’s interesting how a number of conversations tend to pop up around the same issue in a short space of time. I read a very interesting thread from one of our support guys recently about trying to select the correct administrator credentials for the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC). RVC is a command line utility to manage various aspects of vSphere and has been extended to include VSAN functionality. The following day, I saw a thread on the VSAN forums for exactly the same thing – a customer experiencing difficultly logging into RVC on a remote vCenter server as administrator. The…
I’ve done a few posts in the past which discuss the VM Home Namespace object. To recap, the VM Home Namespace is where we store all the virtual machine configuration files, such as the .vmx, .log, digest files, memory snapshots, etc. I also highlighted that the VM Home Namespace is limited to 255GB in size. This led one reader to raise the following observation: It means that it is not possible to do a snapshot with memory for a VM with 256 GB of RAM. This is indeed correct. If you attempt to snapshot a VM (with memory) that has…
A couple of weeks ago the electronic version of Essential Virtual SAN was published and this week the first paper copies started shipping! Because of that, Duncan and I decided we will give away 4 e-books each. If you want to win one then please let us know why you feel you deserve to win a copy using the hashtag #essentialvirtualsan on twitter. Duncan and I will decide which 8 tweets will win an eBook, and of course we will favor the ones that make us laugh – it’s as simple as that! So just to be clear: Tweet why you…
I was involved in an interesting thread recently with one of our VSAN partners regarding disk sizes used in VSAN, and what impact smaller drives may have. In an earlier post, I discussed reasons why VSAN would stripe a VMDK storage object even though a stripe width was not requested in the VM Storage Policy – Why is my Storage Object striped? In that post, I highlighted the fact that if the VMDK storage object is too big to fit onto the free space of a single hard disk, then it will automatically be striped across multiple hard disks. However…
This is a question that has come up a number of times. Many of you will now be familiar with the VM Storage Policy capability Number Of Failures To Tolerate for VSAN, which defines how many failures can occur in the VSAN cluster and still provide a full copy of the data to allow a virtual machine to remain available. In this short post, I will explain how many physical ESXi hosts you need to accommodate the Number of Failures To Tolerate requirement in the VM Storage Policy.