Change policy on a vSAN object via RVC

I had someone reach out to me recently, asking for a way to change the policy on a file that was uploaded to a vSAN datastore, e.g. an ISO image. When a file is uploaded to the vSAN datastore, a VM Home namespace object is created. It is into this ‘file system’ type object that the files/ISOs are stored. Initially, I looked at ways to change the VM Home namespace. I looked at various commands to change the policy and I did find some in RVC, the Ruby vSphere Console. Unfortunately all the spbm.namespace_change commands look for a VM as…

Deploying vSAN with Photon Platform v1.2

This is a bit of a long post, but there is a lot to cover. In a previous post, I walked through the deployment of Photon Platform v1.2, which included the Photon Installer, followed by the Photon Controller, Load-Balancer and Lightwave appliances. If you’ve read the previous post, you will have read that Photon Platform v1.2 include the OVAs for these components within the Photon Installer appliance. So no additional download steps are necessary. However, because vSAN is not included, it will have to be downloaded separately from MyVMware. The other very important point is that Photon Platform is not…

Deploy Kubernetes manually on Photon Controller v1.1 and vSAN

I mentioned in a previous post that we have recently released Photon Controller version 1.1, and one of the major enhancements was the inclusion of support for vSAN. I wrote about the steps to do this in the previous post, but now I want to show you how to utilize vSAN storage for the orchestration frameworks (e.g. Kubernetes) that you deploy on top of Photon Controller. In other words, I am going to describe the steps that need to be taken in order for these Kubernetes VMs (master, etcd, workers) to be able to consume the vsanDatastore that is now…

Photon Controller v1.1 and vSAN interoperability

Many of you will have seen the recent announcement for Photon Controller version 1.1. For me, the interesting part of this announcement is the support for vSAN as a storage platform with Photon Controller v1.1. I should think that the first question that those of you are familiar with both vSAN and Photon Controller will ask is “how do I configure vSAN for Photon Controller when there is no vCenter server in the mix?”. This is a very good question, and one which I will highlight in this blog post. There are also a few line items in the release…

Docker Volume Driver for vSphere on Virtual SAN

I took another opportunity this week to look at our new Docker Volume Driver for vSphere which is currently in tech preview. This time I wanted to see how it behaved on Virtual SAN (VSAN). What I wanted to do is query the layout of the VMDK storage object on VSAN, and how an administrator can query its layout from vCenter server, but also from RVC, the Ruby vSphere Console. There might be a situation where you need to to query this information. My colleague, Wiliam Lam, has already added some information about how you can deploy volumes with different…

VSAN 6.2 Part 12 – VSAN 6.1 to 6.2 Upgrade Steps

I’ve already written a few articles around this, notably on stretched cluster upgrades and on-disk format issues. In this post, I just wanted to run through the 3 distinct upgrade steps in a little more detail, and show you some useful commands that you can use to monitor the progress. In a nutshell, the steps are: Upgrade vCenter Server to 6.0U2 (VSAN 6.2) Upgrade ESXi hosts to ESXi 6.0U2 (VSAN 6.2) Perform rolling upgrade of on-disk format from V2 to V3 across all hosts

Component Metadata Health – Locating Problematic Disk

I’ve noticed a couple of customers experiencing a Component Metadata Health failure on the VSAN health check recently. This is typically what it looks like: The first thing to note is that the KB associated with this health check states the following: Note: This health check test can fail intermittently if the destaging process is slow, most likely because VSAN needs to do physical block allocations on the storage devices. To work around this issue, run the health check once more after the period of high activity (multiple virtual machine deployments, etc) is complete. If the health check continues to fail the…