In this post I though it might be useful to share some information about VSAN interoperability with VMware’s flagship backup and restore product, vSphere Data Protection also known as VDP. First a note about versions – that you will need to use the March 2014 release of VDP (version 5.5.6), not just to backup VMs running on VSAN, but to back up VMs running on vSphere 5.5U1. Here is a comment taken from the release notes for ESXi 5.5 U1: vSphere Data Protection. vSphere Data Protection 5.1 is not compatible with vSphere 5.5 because of a change in the way…
After spending a lot of time looking at the architecture of VSAN, I wanted to spend some time looking at how well it inter-operates with other vSphere products and features. vSphere Replication is a product which works quite well with VSAN. If you want to provide disaster-recovery using VSAN as a storage layer, you will need to use vSphere Replication version 5.5.1 which was released in March 2014. One thing with vSphere Replication is that it is agnostic to the underlying storage. Having said that, the consideration with using vSphere Replication with VSAN is down to the VM Storage Policies…
Our team was recently asked to take a VSAN novice through a VSAN deployment, to figure out if there were any configuration gotchas. This post will share the stumbling blocks that you might encounter deploying your own VSAN environment.
Well, VSAN is finally GA today. Check out Duncan’s blog post which has lots of good links about where to get the GA bits. In this post, I am going to address a question about the VM Home Namespace object on VSAN which has come up a number of times recently and has caused a little bit of confusion. If you’ve been following my series of Virtual SAN articles, you may recall that virtual machines deployed on a VSAN datastore are now made up as a set of objects (as opposed to the set of files that we’ve been used…
I’ve been having lots of fun lately in my new role in Integration Engineering. It is also good to have someone local once again to bounce ideas off. Right now, that person is Paudie O’Riordan (although sometimes I bet he wishes I was in a different timezone 🙂 ). One of the things we are currently looking at is a VSAN implementation using Fusion-io ioDrive2 cards (which our friends over at Fusion-io kindly lent us). The purpose of this post is to show the steps involved in configuring these cards on ESXi and adding them as nodes to a VSAN…
[Updated: 17th Feb 2016] Following on from my recent post on how to reclaim disks that were previously used by VSAN, I was asked how one can remove a disk group from a host that is participating in a VSAN [5.5] cluster. This is quite straight forward, but there is one minor caveat and it relates to whether the VSAN cluster has been setup in Automatic Mode or Manual Mode. If you want to learn more about the behaviour of the different modes, you can read up on it here.
A number of customers have raised this question. How do you reclaim disks which were once used by VSAN but you now wish to use these disks for other purposes? Well, first off, if you are using some of the later builds of VSAN and you place the host into maintenance mode and remove the disk group from the host, this will automatically remove the partitions from the disks and you are good to go with reusing these disks for some other purpose. However, if you do something such as reinstall ESXi on the host but do not go through…