I was heavily involved in the documentation effort for VSAN 6.0, but I know that not everyone likes to RTFM, so to speak. What I thought I would do in this post is give an overview of the upgrade process, and highlight some considerations. But I really would urge you to read through the VSAN 6.0 Administrators Guide, and perhaps the VSAN Troubleshooting Reference Manual, especially the sections dealing with upgrades, if you do plan to upgrade from VSAN 5.5 to 6.0. There is a lot of useful information there. There are four steps to the upgrade process: Upgrading vCenter…
vSphere 6.0 released yesterday. It included the new version of Virtual SAN – 6.0. I now wish to start sharing some of the new features and functionality with you. One of things we always enforced with version 5.5 was the fact that when you deployed a VM with NumberOfFailuresToTolerate = 1, you always had at least 3 components: 1st copy of the data, 2nd copy of the data, and then a witness component for quorum. In version 5.5, for a VM to remain accessible, “one full copy of the data and more than 50% of components must be available”. We…
The embargo on what’s new in vSphere 6.0 has now been lifted, so we can now start to discuss publicly about new features and functionality. For the last number of months, I’ve been heavily involved in preparing for the Virtual SAN launch. What follows is a brief description of what I find to be the most interesting and exciting of the upcoming features in Virtual SAN 6.0. Later on, I will be following up with more in-depth blog posts on the new features and functionality.
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…