Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Virtual SAN

Capacity Overview in vSAN 6.7 U3

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I just wanted to do a short post before the weekend, in vSAN 6.7 U3 there’s a great capacity overview screen. It shows a couple of things, first of all it provides a simple bar that shows “data written”, “reserved space” and “free space”. The second section provides you the ability to figure out what happens to your capacity consumption if you would change the policy on all VMs. The third section gives you a bice breakdown of the capacity per category and a great circular diagram which shows immediately what kind of data is consuming your capacity. Very useful!

Can you move a vSAN Stretched Cluster to a different vCenter Server?

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I noticed a question today on one of our internal social platforms, the question was if you can move a vSAN Stretched Cluster to a different vCenter Server. I can be short, I tested it and the answer is yes! How do you do it? Well, we have a great KB that actually documents the process for a normal vSAN Cluster and the same applies to a stretched cluster. When you add the hosts to your new vCenter Server and into your newly created cluster it will pull in the fault domain details (stretched cluster configuration details) from the hosts itself, so when you go to the UI the Fault Domains will pop up again, as shown in the screenshot below.

What did I do? Well in short, but please use the KB for the exact steps:

  • Powered off all VMs
  • Placed the hosts into maintenance mode (do not forget about the Witness!)
  • Disconnected all hosts from the old vCenter Server, again, do not forget about the witness
  • Removed the hosts from the inventory
  • Connected the Witness to the new vCenter Server
  • Created a new Cluster object on the new vCenter Server
  • Added the stretched cluster hosts to the new cluster on the new vCenter Server
  • Took the Witness out of Maintenance Mode first
  • Took the other hosts out of maintenance

That was it, pretty straight forward. Of course, you will need to make sure you have the storage policies in both locations, and you will also need to do some extra work if you use a VDS. Nevertheless, it works pretty much straight-forward and as you would expect it to work!

VMworld Reveals: VMware Cloud Foundation (#HBI1432BUR)

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At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about VMware Cloud Foundation, which was session HBI1432BUR. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. This session was presented by Mark Chuang and Jayanta K Dey. Please note that this is a summary of a session which is discussing the technology direction of the products, the discussed features may never be released, and this direction does not represent a commitment of any kind, and is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what is happening in the VMware Cloud Foundation space?

Jayanta kicked off with an introduction, and I believe most of you understand why we need to simplify IT, and if not, it is all about optimizing cost and improving speed/agility/time to market. This can only be achieved when you have a platform that caters for this, or basically a platform that enables you to focus on delivering services which are valuable to the business instead of focussing on the underlying infrastructure. This is where VMware Cloud Foundation comes in to play. It is a consistent and prescriptive full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure which can run any application.

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VMworld Reveals: HCI Present and Futures (#HCI2733BU)

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At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about HCI / vSAN futures, which was session HCI2733BU. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. This session was presented by Srinivasan Murari and Vijay Ramachandran. Please note that this is a summary of a session which is discussing the roadmap of VMware’s HCI offering, these features may never be released, and this preview does not represent a commitment of any kind, and this feature (or it’s functionality) is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what is VMware planning for the future of HCI? Some of the features discussed during this session were also discussed last year, I wrote a summary here for those interested.

Vijay kicked off the session with an overview of the current state of HCI and more specifically VMware vSAN and Cloud Foundation. Some of the use cases were discussed, and it was clear that today the majority of VMware HCI solutions are running business-critical apps on top. More and more customers are looking to adopt full stack HCI as they need an end-to-end story that includes compute, networking, storage, security and business continuity for all applications running on top of it. As such VMware’s HCI solution has been focussed on lifecycle management and automation of all aspects of the SDDC. This is also the reason why VMware is currently the market leader in this space with over 20k customers and a market share of over 41%.

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VMworld Session Summary: #HCI1207BU HCI Management: Current and Future

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I wasn’t able to sit in this session in person, but fortunately, the recording was out within a day. This session has been one of my favorite vSAN related sessions in the past couple of years, and it definitely is one of my favorite sessions this year. Again presented by Christian Dickmann and JunChi Zhang.

In this session, JunChi and Christian will go over some of VMware’s ideas around what HCI Management should look like in the future (HCI1207BU). Christian started by providing an overview of what HCI/vSAN is about today. Christian explained that the world of vSAN was relatively simple in the early years, but today the infrastructures where vSAN is being deployed, and the use-cases, are getting more complex. More and more customers are deploying in various locations and want to manage these solutions in a consistent and efficient way.

The topics which were covered in the session are Lifecycle Management, Intelligent Operations and Cloud Native Apps. JunChi started with Lifecycle Management. JunChi talked about what the vSAN team developed to make life easier when it comes to deploying vSphere. For instance, it is possible to specify in the vCenter Installer that vCenter needs to run on a new vSAN cluster and then the installer will create a single node vSAN cluster to ensure this is possible. Also, the Cluster Quickstart Guide was added, a great way to create and configure a vSphere cluster end to end. [Read more…] about VMworld Session Summary: #HCI1207BU HCI Management: Current and Future