Wow – more than 20,000 vSAN customers. What an amazing journey it has been. If you haven’t seen it, vSAN license bookings grew over 50% year-over-year in Q1 with a total customer count growing to over 20,000 (seekingalpha.com). Now we need to keep the pace and, as Duncan put it, remain the number 1 player in the hyperconverged and hybrid cloud world! As a sort of thank you to everyone who helped make this happen, Duncan and I have decided to lower the price of our vSAN Deep Dive book for 1 week. So, until Friday, June 7th, we have…
A few weeks back, I took a look at Heptio Velero, formely known as Ark. Velero provides backup and restore capabilities for cloud native applications. During that research, I used a Couchbase DB as my application of choice for backup/restore. After speaking to Couchbase regarding that blog post, they strongly recommended I try the new Couchbase operator rather than the StatefulSet method that I was using for the application. Couchbase talk about the advantages of the operator approach over StatefulSets here. Now, while Couchbase provide steps on how to deploy Couchbase with their operator, they create it in the default…
I’ve been spending a bit of time lately look at our Heptio Velero product, and how it works with various cloud native applications. Next application on my list is MongoDB, another NoSQL database. I looked at various deployment mechanisms for MongoDB, and it seems that using Helm Charts is the most popular approach. This led me to the Bitnami MongoDB Stack Chart GitHub Repo. At this point, I did spin my wheels a little trying to get MongoDB stood up. In this post, I’ll talk through some of the gotchas I encountered. Once again, my environment is vSphere 6.7 and…
At VMworld last year, Duncan Epping and I presented on the power of Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM for short). You can find all of the slides and recordings here. One of the demos we used in the presentation was deploying virtual machines via vRealize Automation, and showing how to consume a storage policy on vSAN. This was using a vRealize Automation plugin, and to be honest, it was a little bit challenging to get it to work. And it wasn’t really a VMware plugin per-se, but something developed by our field team. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we…
Degraded Device Handling (DDH) or Dying Disk Handling as it was formerly known, is a feature that has been available in vSAN for some time. However, I regularly get questions about how it works. The DDH behavior has changed significantly over various versions. We may as well begin this post with an overview about the purpose of DDH and then get into the different sort of behaviors. First of all, the reason behind a feature such as DDH is to help avoid cluster performance degradation due to an unhealthy drive. In the early days of vSAN, we had come across…
I had a very interesting question recently about how vSAN handles a failure in an object that is running with an erasure coding configuration. In the case of vSAN this is either a RAID-5 or a RAID-6. On vSAN, a RAID-5 is implemented with 3 data segments and 1 parity segment (3+1), with parity striped across all four components. RAID-6 is implemented as 4 data segments and 2 parity segments (4+2), again with the parity striped across all of the six components. Now, on vSAN, RAID-5 requires 4 physical ESXi hosts for implementation, with each host backing one set of…
I am delighted to announce the availability of our newly updated VMware vSAN 6.7U1 Deep Dive book. This is the 3rd edition of the book. As the title states, this book’s content has been updated to include information about the latest version of vSAN, which is of course 6.7U1. Much thanks to my good friend and co-author, Duncan Epping. As well as doing his share of the content, Duncan took care of all of the admin to get the book available online, something I have no clue about. Thanks man! Also a great big shout out to both Pete Koehler…