I was looking for a way to migrate VMkernel adapters back from a VDS to a VSS. This was because I am testing various upcoming releases of vCenter Server 8.0 and vSphere with Tanzu. vSphere with Tanzu, if you do not use NSX-T, requires a distributed switch and distributed portgroups. After building out some test environments, I wanted to roll back a distributed switch (VDS) configuration to a standard vSwitch (VSS) configuration. The process seems to have changed a few times in the past, and I could not find anything that demonstrated how to do task on vSphere 7.0. Thus…
When VMware first introduced support for Kubernetes, our first storage driver was the VCP, the in-tree vSphere Cloud Provider. Some might remember that this driver was referred to as Project Hatchway back in the day. This in-tree driver allows Kubernetes to consume vSphere storage for persistent volumes. One of draw-backs to the in-tree driver approach was that every storage vendor had to include their own driver in each Kubernetes distribution, which ballooned the core Kubernetes code and made maintenance difficult. Another drawback of this approach was that vendors typically had to wait for a new version of Kubernetes to release…
I had another question recently about whether or not the Storage vMotion behaviour of renaming VM files on a VMFS or NFS datastore also worked with Virtual Volumes or VVols? After a quick test, I can state categorically that the answer is yes. I created a VM on a Nimble Storage appliance, presented two unique storage containers (aka virtual volume datastores), deployed a test VM on one of the VVol datastores, and then renamed the VM in the vSphere web client. I then verified that the VM name in the vSphere client was different to the names of its files…
In Virtual SAN 6.0, a new snapshot format was introduced called vsanSparse. This improves snapshot functionality by leveraging the new VirstoFS on-disk format used with VSAN 6.0. I had a question recently about what would happen if I migrated a VM with a traditional vmfsSparse/redo log type snapshot. The question was whether or not it would be converted to the new vsanSparse format. Similarly, what if a VM with a vsanSparse snapshot was migrated from VSAN to a traditional VMFS/NFS datastore? Would it also be converted between formats? I decided that the only way was to try it out.
This is a question that seems to come up regularly, but I don’t think it appears in any great detail in external facing documentation. The question is “when do we stun (or in other words, quiesce) virtual machines”, why do we do it, and more importantly, how long can a stun operation take? One of our staff engineers, Jesse Pool, put together some really good explanations around the VM stun operation, which I am leveraging for this post. I took some particular interest in this as I wrote a bunch of snapshot posts recently around Virtual Volumes (VVols) so I…