The value of Virtual Volumes (VVols)

Regular readers will know that I normally blog about the technical aspects of storage, as opposed to doing opinion pieces. However there have been a number of articles published recently questioning the value of VMware’s Virtual Volumes, commonly referred to as VVols. In general, the pieces I have read ask whether or not VVols (or to be more accurate, per-VM granularity feature of VVols) adds value when NFS is already doing per-VM granularity in the form of files. The point that was missed in these pieces is that VVols is so much more than per-VM granularity. I’ve just come back…

VSAN 6.0 Part 9 – Proactive Re-balance

This is another nice new feature of Virtual SAN 6.0. It basically is a directive to VSAN to start re-balancing components belonging to virtual machine objects around all the hosts and all the disks in the cluster. Why might you want to do this? Well, it’s very simple. As VMs are deployed on the VSAN datastore, there are algorithms in place to place those components across the cluster in a balanced fashion. But what if a hosts was placed into maintenance mode, and you requested that the data on the host be evacuated prior to entering maintenance mode, and now…

VSAN 6.0 Part 6 – Maintenance Mode Changes

There is a subtle difference in maintenance mode behaviours between VSAN version 5.5 and VSAN version 6.0. In Virtual SAN version 5.5, when a host is placed into maintenance mode with the “Ensure Accessibility” option, the host is maintenance mode continues to contribute its storage towards the VSAN datastore. In other words, any VMs that had components stored on this host still remained fully compliance with all of the components available. In VSAN 6.0, this behaviour changed. Now, when a host is placed into maintenance mode, it no longer contributes storage to the VSAN datastore, and any components that reside…

VSAN 6.0 Part 5 – new vsanSparse snapshots

There is a new snapshot format introduced in VSAN 6.0 called vsanSparse. These replace the traditional vmfsSparse format (redo logs). The vmfsSparse format was used when snapshots of VMs were taken in VSAN 5.5, and are also the format used when a snapshot is taken of a VM residing on traditional VMFS and NFS. The older vmfsSparse format left a lot to be desired when it came to performance and scalability. This KB article from our support team, indicating that no snapshot should be used for more than 72 hours, and snapshot chains should contain no more than 2-3 snapshots,…

VSAN 6.0 Part 4 – All-Flash VSAN Capacity Tier Considerations

In Virtual SAN version 6.0, VMware introduced support for an all-flash VSAN. In other words, both the caching layer and the capacity layer could be made up of flash-based devices such as SSDs.  However, the mechanism for marking some flash devices as being designated for the capacity layer, while leaving other flash devices as designated for the caching layer, is not at all intuitive at first glance. For that reason, I’ve included some steps here on how to do it.

VSAN 6.0 Part 3 – New Default Datastore Policy

One of the most common issues I got questions about in VSAN 5.5 was “why is VSAN deploying thick disks, when all of the documentation stated that VSAN deploys thin disks”? The answer was quite straight forward, and was due to the fact that the VMs were being deployed without a VM Storage Policy. This meant that it went through the standard VM deployment wizard which offered administrators the option of thin, lazy-zeroed thick (LZT) and eager-zeroed thick (EZT). The default option is LZT, which if you just do click-click-click (just like I do) when deploying a VM, then you…

VSAN 6.0 Part 2 – v2 On-disk Format Upgrade Considerations

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…