Getting started with VCF Part 11 – External Storage

I got an interesting question recently on my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) blog series. An observation was made that all of my posts highlighted vSAN as the storage for both the management domain and the workload domains. The question was whether other types of storage could be used in VCF. While we would always promote vSAN as the primary storage for VCF, the answer is yes, other storage types can be used. But I need to qualify this statement. The management domain always uses vSAN. This is automatically configured during the bring up process of the management domain and provides…

Getting Started with VCF Part 6 – Workload Domain

The VMware Cloud Foundation 3.9 journey continues. In this post, we are going to build our very first workload domain (WLD). In part 5, we commissioned 3 x vSphere 6.7U3 ESXi hosts that will form the basis of our new WLD. A number of actions will take place during this deployment. Firstly, a new 6.7 vCenter Server will be deployed in the management domain. Then, the 3 commissioned ESXi hosts will be clustered together, allowing vSAN and vSphere HA to be enabled. We will also see NSX-T (version 2.5) deployed for the WLD as I am going to deploy NSX-T…

Getting started with VCF Part 5 – Commission Hosts

At this stage, we’ve done quite a number of tasks related to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Our management domain is up and running, and we also have the vRealize Suite of products deployed (vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Operations Manager, and of course vRealize Automation). Our next step is to commission some new ESXi hosts so we can create our very first VI Workload Domain (WLD) which we can start using for production purposes. This post will look at the steps involved in commissioning the hosts. Note that in this example, I am going to commission ESXi…

Extending an ESXi diagnostic core dump partition on a vSAN 6.5 node

This is something very interesting which gained support with the release of vSAN 6.5. It will be of interest to those customers who boot their ESXi hosts from USB/SD devices, and also have vSAN configured. One long-standing restriction with this configuration was the inability to boot from USB/SD when the amount of memory in the host is over 512GB. This is because we could not guarantee that the memory dump would fit in the pre-sized core dump partition. Well, now we have the ability to resize the core dump partition, even when it resides on a USB/SD device. The guidance…

How to SSH between ESXi 6.0U2 hosts without providing a password

Before I get into this post, I do want to highlight that you probably will not do this in any production type environment. The reason why I implemented this, and how this post came about, is because I was helping out with our new edition of the VSAN 6.2. Hands-On-Lab (which should be available imminently by the way). Part of the lab involved demonstrating checksum functionality. Since VSAN has a distributed architecture, there was a requirement to run commands on different hosts. Rather than having lab participants input the password each and every time to run a command on the…

VSAN and OEM ESXi ISO images

There has been a bit of confusion recently over the use of OEM ESXi ISO images and Virtual SAN. These OEM ESXi ISO images allow our partners to pre-package a bunch of their own drivers and software components so that you have them available to you immediately on install. While this can be very beneficial for non-VSAN environments, it is not quite so straight-forward for VSAN deployments. Drivers associated with VSAN have to go through extra testing for some very good reasons that I will allude to shortly. The issue really pertains to the drivers that are shipped with many…