Read locality in VSAN stretched cluster

Many regular readers will know that we do not do read locality in Virtual SAN. For VSAN, it has always been a trade-off of networking vs. storage latency. Let me give you an example. When we deploy a virtual machine with multiple objects (e.g. VMDK), and this VMDK is mirrored across two disks on two different hosts, we read in a round-robin fashion from both copies based on the block offset. Similarly, as the number of failures to tolerate is increased, resulting in additional mirror copies, we continue to read in a round-robin fashion from each copy, again based on…

Automating the IOPS setting in the Round Robin PSP

A number of you have reached out about how to change some of the settings around path policies, in particular how to set the default number of iops in the Round Robin path selection policy (PSP) to 1. While many of you have written scripts to do this, when you reboot the ESXi host, the defaults of the PSP are re-applied and then you have to run the scipts again to reapply the changes. Here I will show you how to modify the defaults so that when you unclaim/reclaim the devices, or indeed reboot the host, the desired settings come…

Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) Deep-Dive – Part 3

So far in this series, we have looked at the Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) and MPPs (Multipath Plugins). We have delved into the Native Multipath Plugin (NMP), and had a look at its sub-plugins, the Storage Array Type Plugin (SATP) and Path Selection Plugin (PSP). We have seen how the PSA selects an MPP, and if that MPP is the NMP, how the NMP selects an SATP and PSP. Note – if you are having trouble following all the acronyms, you are not the first. There is a glossary at the end of the first blog post. And if we…