iSCSI on vSAN Stretched Cluster

vSAN readers will most likely be aware that we introduced support for iSCSI on vSAN way back in vSAN 6.5. That is to say, we had the ability to create iSCSI targets and LUNs using vSAN objects, and present the LUNs to external iSCSI initiators. That release also supported Persistent Group Reservations (PGRs) but it did lack transparent failover. We followed this up with an enhancement in vSAN 6.7 which enabled transparent failover. This enabled support for features like Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) to work on iSCSI on vSAN, if using shared disk mode as it uses reservations on…

2-node vSAN topologies review

There has been a lot of discussion in the past around supported topologies for 2-node vSAN, specifically around where we can host the witness. Now my good pal Duncan has already highlighted some of this in his blog post here, but the questions continue to come up about where I can, and where I cannot place the witness for a 2-node vSAN deployment. I also want to highlight that many of these configuration considerations are covered by our official documentation. For example, there is the very comprehensive VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 for Remote Office and Branch Office Deployment Reference Architecture…

vSphere 5.x, NFS, VAAI-NAS & IPv6 Support

A short note to clarify something that has come up a number of times in recent weeks here at VMware. There have been a number of discussions about whether or not we support NFS over IPv6 on vSphere 5.x,  and again, on whether or not we support the VAAI-NAS primitives in the same context. VAAI is an API for offloading tasks to the storage array, but for offloading tasks to NAS arrays, storage vendors need to create  their own plugins for the ESXi hosts to achieve this. You can learn more about VAAI-NAS by clicking here. So what about IPv6…