vSAN File Services considerations

Duncan Epping · Apr 15, 2020 · 11 Comments

I was looking into vSAN File Services this week as I had some customers asking about requirements and constraints. I wanted to list some of the things to understand about vSAN File Service as it is important when you are designing and configuring it. First of all, it is good to have an understanding of the implementation, well at least somewhat as vSAN File Services is managed/upgraded/update as part of vSAN. It is not an entity you as an admin don’t manage the appliance you see deployed. I created a quick demo about vSAN File Services which you can find here.

If you look at the diagram (borrowed from docs.vmware.com) above you can see that vSAN File Service leverages Agent/Appliance VMs and within each Agent VM a container, or “protocol stack”, is running. The protocol stack is what exposes the file system as an NFS file share. [Read more…] about vSAN File Services considerations

Scaling out your vSAN File Services Cluster

Duncan Epping · Apr 10, 2020 · Leave a Comment

This week I have been testing with vSAN File Services and one of the procedures I wanted to run through was scaling out my vSAN File Services cluster. In my case, I have a cluster of 5 hosts and what I want to do is add a host to my vSAN cluster, expand the vSAN Datastore and also grow my vSAN File Services cluster.

First of all, when you add a host into the cluster you need to make sure it is in maintenance mode. If if is not in maintenance mode then vSAN FS will instantly try to clone a vSAN File Services agent VM (FS VM) on to it and that process will fail as there’s no disk group yet. So make sure to place the host into maintenance mode before adding it to the cluster.

After you added it to the cluster, you have to create the disk group first. Claim all the disks that need to be part of the disk group and create the disk group. When you have done that you can take the host out of maintenance mode. Now the FS VM will be cloned and powered on. However, one thing you will need to do is expand the IP Pool for the vSAN FS Protocol Stack container. You can do this as follows:

Go to your cluster
Click on vSAN / Services
Go to File Service and click Edit on the right
Go to the IP Pool page by clicking Next twice
Add that additional IP address and DNS Name
Click Next / Finish

Now a new Protocol Stack Container can be instantiated in that new FS VM and your vSAN File Services cluster has been scaled out properly. I created a simple demo showing you what the process looks like, make sure to check it out below!

Startup intro: SaaS-based backup solution Clumio

Duncan Epping · Apr 6, 2020 · 2 Comments

Last week I saw an update from one of the Clumio founders on twitter. It reminded me that I had promised to take a look at their product. This week I had a meeting set up with Clumio and we went over their product and how to configure it briefly. Clumio is a SaaS based backup solution that was founded in 2017 by former PernixData, Nutanix, EMC folks. The three founders are Poojan Kumar, Kaustubh Patil, and Woon Jung, and those three you may remember from PernixData. One thing to point out is that they had 3 rounds of funding (~190 million dollars) so far and they came out of stealth around VMworld 2019. Coincidentally they won the Gold award for Best of VMworld in the data protection category, and best of show for the entire show, not bad for a first VMworld. I guess that I have to point out that although I would classify them as backup/recovery today, they are adding new functionality weekly and “backup/recovery” is probably not a fair category, data protection is more appropriate and it would not surprise me if that evolves to data management and protection over time. If you are not a fan of reading, simply head over to my youtube video on Clumio, otherwise, just continue below.

So how does it work conceptually? Well they basically have a SaaS solution, but you will need to install an OVA (they call it a cloud connector) in your environment to connect to the SaaS platform for VMware on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS. When you connect AWS EBS they use a cloud formation template. This cloud connector is a 4 vCPU/8GB virtual machine that then needs the ability to connect to “the outside world” of course. The Cloud Connector is stateless and requires no updates. You can run this Cloud Connector appliance in multiple clusters, on-prem, or in VMware Cloud on AWS and once they are registered you will see those data sources in your portal. This is nice as you can see all your data sources across public and private clouds in one single pane of glass. You will have the ability to define “backup schemes” by creating policies. These policies can of course then be associated with objects. These objects can be VMs, Clusters and even vCenter Server instances. This means that if you assign a policy to vCenter Server that every new VM created will inherit the policy automatically. You may wonder, where is your data stored? Your data is stored in S3 buckets that are part of the Clumio SaaS-based platform. Customers are isolated from each other, they will have their own dedicated S3 buckets, and these buckets are created and maintained by Clumio, you as a customer only interact with Clumio! [Read more…] about Startup intro: SaaS-based backup solution Clumio

ESXTOP in vSphere 7

Duncan Epping · Apr 2, 2020 · Leave a Comment

I was playing around with Scalable Shares and then noticed some enhancements in esxtop which I didn’t realize were there. I figured I would list the changes I spotted so people are aware of what was added to esxtop in vSphere 7.0. Although it isn’t a huge amount, it is still very valuable to know!

RDMA Device “display” is added, so a fully new category for those running RDMA!
- This, of course, has fields like “Megabits Tx/s”, “% Packets Dropped” etc.
CPU Display now has the ability to disable the PCPU usage info at the top by typing “f” followed by “k”
vSAN Display now provides UNMAP stats (E, F) additionally

What is also new is that you can now suppress the server physical CPU stats when you type “esxtop -u”, this could be useful when dumping your info into a .csv file. I just added the new details to my ESXTOP page as well, for those who use that as a reference. If there’s more I stumble into then I will report it.

Install and Configure vSphere Replication with SRM 8.3 on vSphere 7

Duncan Epping · Apr 2, 2020 · Leave a Comment

I haven’t really done much with vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager (SRM) in the past years as my main focus has been vSAN. I figured I would get two clusters up and running and install and configure both vSphere Replication as well as SRM on top of vSphere 7. Although the installation and configuration are pretty straight forward, there are a few steps which are important. Below the steps I took to get things up and running.

Deploy the vSphere Replication appliance in both clusters
Deploy the Site Recovery Manager appliance in both clusters
Go to “https://<ip of vSphere Replication appliance>:5480” in first cluster
- username: root
- password: what ever you specified!
Click on “Configuration Page” link
Specify Password of vCenter Server in the Password field
Click “Apply Network Settings”
Click “Save and Restart Service”
Accept the SSL Certificate
Repeat the above for the second cluster!
Now go to your vSphere H5 Client and wait until the vSphere Replicated tasks are completed
Log out of the vSphere H5 Client and log back in for both clusters
Now go to the first cluster / vCenter server
Now click on “Menu” and then “Site Recovery”
Click “open Site Recovery”
Click “New Site Pair”
Fill out the details of the second vCenter Server
Click Next and Connect if you get a security alert and are certain this is the correct vCenter instance
Select the correct listed vCenter instance and vSphere Replication appliance
Click Next and Finish, now you will see a task within vCenter that states “Connect vSphere Replication Sites”
Now you have vSphere Replication running and you can replicate VMs from one location to the other manually if and when desired.