I’m a bit late in bringing this to your attention, but there is a potential issue with VASA storage providers disconnecting from vCenter resulting in no VSAN capabilities being visible when you try to create a VM Storage Policy. These storage providers (there is one on each ESXi host participating in the VSAN Cluster) provide out-of-band information about the underlying storage system, in this case VSAN. If there isn’t at least one of these providers on the ESXi hosts communicating to the SMS (Storage Monitoring Service) on vCenter, then vCenter will not be able to display any of the capabilities…
Well, after almost 8 months of work, the VSAN book that I have been working on with Duncan Epping is finally available for general download. This is the first book I’ve written, and I’ll always be grateful for the guidance and mentoring I received from Duncan. I’m also extremely grateful to a number of people at VMware Press (Pearson) for their willingness to sponsor this project. There are also numerous people at VMware that deserve thanks for their input and support, and you’ll find them listed in the acknowledgements section of the book. We’re hopeful that this book will provide…
I am extremely excited about this year’s VMworld. I’m participating is some really great sessions, and the Essential VSAN book which Duncan Epping and I have been working on for the past 7-8 months should be available too.
This is a question that has come up a number of times. Many of you will now be familiar with the VM Storage Policy capability Number Of Failures To Tolerate for VSAN, which defines how many failures can occur in the VSAN cluster and still provide a full copy of the data to allow a virtual machine to remain available. In this short post, I will explain how many physical ESXi hosts you need to accommodate the Number of Failures To Tolerate requirement in the VM Storage Policy.
In this post, we talk about a particular behaviour with using the default (or None) policy with VSAN. I have stated many times in the past that when a VM is deployed on the VSAN datastore, it behaves like it is thinly provisioned unless the capability ‘Object Space Reservation’ (OSR) is specified in the VM Storage Policy. The OSR will pre-allocate space on the VSAN datastore for the virtual machine’s storage objects, and is specified as a percentage of the actual VMDK size. However, there is a slightly different behaviour when the default policy is used. Once again, I was…
Those of you familiar with VSAN will know that one of the capabilities which can be placed in a VM Storage Policy is Number of Disk Stripes Per Object (stripe width for short). I covered this in an earlier post which looked at the various VSAN capabilities. Recently, a customer who had not specified a stripe width in the VM Storage Policy was perplexed to find that his storage objects had indeed been striped across a number of disks. He reached out to me if I could provide an explanation.
I thought it might be useful to share some of the various VM Storage Policy status that I have observed whilst testing Virtual SAN (VSAN). I’m sure this is by no means a complete list but as I said, these are the ones that I have come across and I am sure these are the status that you will observe most often too.