
Reading Time: 3 minutes VMware vSAN has become a reliable solution with a good and usable HTML5 GUI. But sometimes you have have some issues in object health with the result of some inaccessible vSAN objects.
Reading Time: 3 minutes VMware vSAN has become a reliable solution with a good and usable HTML5 GUI. But sometimes you have have some issues in object health with the result of some inaccessible vSAN objects.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Last week, VMware has announced the future release of VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 3, that means, of course, also the new vSAN 6.7 Update 3 (vSAN is totally integrated in vSphere code). Unfortunately, has happened in past, this is just a product announce, without provide the code of it and the date of General Availability (GA) release date (but I guess will be on VMworld US 2019). I usually prefer talk about what exist now and see the release notes. The products are now GA and, most important the hardware compatibility and the software interoperability matrix have […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes VMware vSAN does not need anymore an introduction: is the Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution from VMware integrated in the ESXi kernel… and is growing more and more in the last years and more more than 500,000 VMware customers for years. There are different way to implement a vSAN solution and one common approach remain to build yourself using vSAN Ready Nodes or certified hardware components.
Reading Time: 2 minutes The VMware vSAN release catalog provides critical information to vSAN build recommendation engine. It will be updated when there are new releases or critical patches and, of course, it’s very important to keep the local copy up-to-date. The vSAN health check feature, will periodically ensure that the local copy of vSAN release catalog is up-to-date.
Reading Time: 2 minutes With VMware vSAN you can use VMware vSphere Update Manager (VUM) to update all the software part, but it can also be useful to manage some hardware related updates. Usually you have to check BIOS version (for example for Spectre and Meltdown bugs), but also the other firmware.
Reading Time: 5 minutes VMware vSAN is a powerful hyperconverged solution, but sometimes still lack of some information or usability. In most cases the health engine is working well and automatically, but in other case it needs your attention and manual operation. One example is the vSAN Disk Balance alarm that sometimes happen in your cluster and bring your healt status no more “green”. This warning just indicate that that the cluster is imbalanced and there are disks that are high on space usage while others are very low, that potentially can make your cluster no more optimal.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Some weeks ago, VMware has discover a possible issue in all VMware vSAN 6.6 and 6.7 cluster, related to hot (or also cold) disk-extend operations. Applications such as databases report in-guest data inconsistency on a VMDK that has been extended while residing on VMware vSAN 6.6 and later. More information of this issue are provided in the VMware KB 58715 (Virtual Machines running on VMware vSAN 6.6 and later report guest data consistency concerns following a disk extend operation).
Reading Time: 6 minutes With the announce of the new vSphere 6.7 Update 1 you should expect also a new version of VMware vSAN (the bits are included in vSphere) and that’s it: vSAN 6.7 Update 1 (strange that has not been used the name vSAN 6.8). VMware vSAN has grown very fast in those years, not only in the number of versions (quite impressive) but also in the customers’ adoption, with more than 14000 organizations using vSAN and with a 110% growth year-over-year.
Reading Time: 3 minutes If you are using Veeam Backup & Replication with a VMware vSAN datastore you are probably following the Veeam KB 2273 (Configuration for VMware VSAN). But this guide is only limit to recommend the hot-add transport mode. So you are going to create several Veeam proxies because Veeam Backup & Replication chooses the most appropriate backup proxy to reduce the backup traffic on the VSAN cluster network. Maybe also one per host.
Reading Time: 2 minutes The vExpert vSAN program is a specific VMware vExpert (sub)programs focused on the vSAN product. The idea to have specialized groups of vExpert was to bring again (like at the origins) the vExpert program as an “elite” program. After the vExpert vSAN 2016 and 2017 lists, now VMware has just announced the vExpert vSAN 2018 new list. I was honored to part of this list again, and that’s pretty exciting, considering that I’m there from the first list.
Reading Time: 5 minutes Just one year ago, VMware has announced vSAN 6.6… now it’s the turn of vSAN 6.7, contextually of the release of vSphere 6.7 GA. VMware vSAN is the VMware’s Software Defined Storage (SDS) solution that also fits in the hyper(visor)-converged model to build a simple (to be managed) and scalable HCI solution. Although is a separate product, the core functions to implement it are already present in the vSphere versions making really easy to deploy and enable it.
Reading Time: 2 minutes VMware vSAN should manage better VM snapshots compared with traditional storage and VMFS datastores. The reason is the new (v2) on-disk format in VSAN 6.0 and the new filesystem that is used: VirstoFS. VirstoFS is the first implementation of technology that was acquired when VMware bought a company called Virsto a number of years ago. Also there is a new sparse format called vsanSparse. These replace the traditional vmfsSparse format (redo logs).
Reading Time: 3 minutes VMware vSAN provides both enterprise-class scale and performance supporting a wide variety of use cases and businesses of all types and sizes. One of the popular use cases for VMware vSAN is running Business-Critical Applications (BCA). But in this case it’s not only running some workload in a virtual environment, but it’s also provide reference architecture, proven configurations and also the ability to use specific functions, like guest clustering.