Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

What’s new for vSAN 7.0 U1!?

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Every 6-9 months VMware has been pushing out a new feature release of vSAN. After vSphere and vSAN 7.0, which introduced vSphere Lifecycle Manager and vSAN File Services, it is now time to share with you what is new for vSAN 7.0 U1. Again it is a feature-packed release, with many “smaller enhancements, but also the introduction of some bigger functionality. Let’s just list the key features that have just been announced, and then discuss each of these individually. You better sit down, as this is going to be a long post. Oh, and note, this is an announcement, not the actual availability of vSAN 7.0 U1, for that you will have to wait some time.

  • vSAN HCI Mesh
  • vSAN Data Persistence Platform
  • vSAN Direct Configuration
  • vSAN File Services – SMB support
  • vSAN File Services – Performance enhancements
  • vSAN File Services – Scalability enhancements
  • vSAN Shared Witness
  • Compression-only
  • Data-in-transit encryption
  • Secure wipe
  • vSAN IO Insight
  • Effective capacity enhancements
  • Enhanced availability during maintenance mode
  • Faster host restarts
  • Enhanced pre-check for vSAN maintenance mode
  • Ability to override default gateway through the UI
  • vLCM support for Lenovo

[Read more…] about What’s new for vSAN 7.0 U1!?

Virtual Events, my thoughts.

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Over the past 9 months, I have done more “zoom” sessions / “virtual events” than I have in the past 5 years. I have seen all the complaints from regular presenters (and attendees) about virtual events, and the flood storm of Zoom requests many have been getting, but personally I seem to be part of the other side of the spectrum as I thoroughly enjoy the virtual events. First and foremost, it helped to relieve stress. To the point where my family noticed a significant change in my mental state/wellbeing, not just the mental aspect, also the physical aspect. It is much easier to have a consistent diet and training regime when you don’t need to hop on a flight to go to an event every other week.

But not only that, I just like the virtual event format. Well, the format which Cormac, Frank, and I developed for our Virtual VMUG Roadshow. Also, the format of the Virtual TAM Roundtable sessions which Cormac and I have been presenting has worked really well. Now, don’t get me wrong. I always enjoyed going to events, having dinner with (new) friends, and talking to people at/during the event… but is it sustainable when you do 20+ events per year as a presenter? And is this model sustainable for attendees when employers are expecting more with less? Not really in my opinion, hence my preference for this virtual world. But that doesn’t answer the question of why I think it has worked for us very well, while it hasn’t worked as well for some others? [Read more…] about Virtual Events, my thoughts.

Host in vSAN cluster with 0 components while other hosts are almost full?

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Internally someone just bumped into an issue where a single host in a cluster wasn’t storing any of the created vSAN Components / Objects. It was to the point where every single host in the cluster was close to the maximum of 9000 components, but that one host had 0 components. After some quick back and forth the following message stood out in the UI:

vSAN node decommission state

What does this mean? Well basically it means that from a vSAN stance this host is in maintenance mode. For whatever reason, the host itself from a hypervisor stance was not in maintenance mode, which means that the two were not in sync. This can simply be resolved by SSH’ing into the respective host and running the following command:

localcli vsan maintenancemode cancel

One thing to consider of course is to trigger a rebalance of the cluster after taking the host out of the decommissioned state when the environment is 6.7 U2 or lower, as that would result in a more equally balanced environment. Starting with  6.7 U3 this process is initiated automatically, when configured. There is a KB that describes how to trigger, and/or configure, to be found here.

Alan Renouf, and his family, need your help. Please support/donate!

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Some of you may have spotted a tweet by Alan Renouf earlier this week, most of you have probably heard about the wildfires in California. If you haven’t, just do a google search… Or take a look at this devastating picture of Alan Renouf’s home:

Yes, on the left is the lovely house Alan and his family owned, on the right is what is left after he and the family had been evacuated due to the wildfires. Unfortunately, as you can see, the only thing that is left is ashes. As they were evacuated, in a rush, at the middle of the night they could barely take anything with them. This means they will need to buy a lot of stuff. You name it, they need it. And yes, of course they have insurance, but as we all know these things will take a significant amount of time and will not cover everything.

Now, we have probably all used some of Alan’s work at some point. His PowerCLI scripts (vCheck etc) have made all of our life’s easier, and if there’s ever a time to give back, this would be it.

One of the Renouf’s friends just created a Go Fund Me page, please consider donating, please share this blog and/or the Go Fund Me page!

vSphere FT and vVols/SPBM an unsupported config? Why?

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I was pointed out by a customer (thanks Johan), that vSphere FT is not supported when using SPBM on non-vSAN based storage systems. You may wonder why this is, at least I did wonder. I figured it would be a testing constraint of some sort, but after emailing product management, engineering, and our quality engineering team I now understand why it is. Now before I explain it, the constraint is documented here, let me quote the section for you:

Virtual Volume datastores.
Storage-based policy management. Storage policies are supported for vSAN storage.

So why is this and why would vSAN be supported as that also uses SPBM? Well the difference is in the implementation. For vVols there’s a dependency on vCenter Server to be available when creating new VMs. This is essentially what happens when an FT instance needs to be restarted. We will need to associate an SPBM policy with it and we can only retrieve it via vCenter Server. With vSAN, FT/HA can also retrieve the needed info via the ESXi host. This is why FT and vSAN are a supported configuration, and vVols and FT, unfortunately, is not at the moment. Hopefully, though, this will change in the future. (Yes, I filed a feature request before anyone asks.)