vSAN Stretched Cluster – Partition behavior changes

My good pal Paudie and I are back in full customer[0] mode these past few weeks, testing out lots of new and upcoming features in future release of vSAN. Our testing led us to building a new vSAN stretched cluster, with 5 nodes on the preferred site, 5 nodes on the secondary site, and of course the obligatory witness node. Now, it had been a while since we put vSAN stretched cluster through its paces. The last time was the vSAN 6.1 release, which led us to create some additional sections on stretched cluster for the vSAN Proof Of Concept…

VSAN 6.2 Part 9 – Replacing the witness appliance

There might be a reason in VSAN stretched cluster environments or in 2-node VSAN ROBO deployments to change the witness appliance. The one thing to keep in mind is that you must use a witness appliance that has the same on-disk format as the rest of the disk groups in the cluster. Right now, there is a 6.1 version of the appliance and a 6.2 version of the appliance, so make sure that you select the correct one. Replacing the current witness with a new witness is very straight forward, and the tasks can be summarized as follows: Deploy the…

VSAN 6.2 Part 8 – Upgrading VSAN Stretched Cluster from 6.1 to 6.2

This is an exercise that we ran through in our lab environment, and we thought that the steps would be useful to share here. By way of introduction, our 4 node cluster is split into a 2+2+1 configuration, where there are 2 ESXi hosts on site A (VLAN 4), 2 ESXi hosts on site B (VLAN 3), and a third site, site C (VLAN 80), hosting the witness appliance (nested ESXi host). All sites are connected over L3. In other words, static routes are added to each of the ESXi hosts so that ESXi hosts on site A can reach…

Supported network topologies for VSAN stretched cluster

As part of the Virtual SAN 6.1 announcements at VMworld 2015, possibly the most eagerly anticipated announcement was the support for a VSAN stretched cluster configuration. Now VSAN can protect your virtual machine across data centers, not just across racks (which was achievable with fault domains introduced in VSAN 6.0). I’ve been hearing requests from customers to support this since the initial VSAN beta, so it is definitely a welcome addition to the supported configurations. The obvious next question is how do I set it up. Well, first of all, you will need to make sure that you have a…

A brief overview of the new Virtual SAN 6.1

With the announcements just made at VMworld 2015, the embargo on Virtual SAN 6.1 has now been lifted, so we can now discuss publicly some of the new features and functionality. Virtual SAN is VMware’s software-defined solution for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). For the last number of months, I’ve been heavily involved in preparing for the Virtual SAN 6.1 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 6.1. Later on, I will follow-up with more in-depth blog posts on the new features and functionality.