Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vsan

vSAN 7.0 UI enhancements for vSphere Replication

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I have been playing around with vSphere / vSAN 7.0 the past week or so. Today I configured vSphere Replication between two vCenter Server instances with vSphere / vSAN 7.0. I wanted to check out the enhancements that were introduced in the UI. Although they are relatively small enhancements, I feel they will make your life as an administrator much easier. The problem people had with VMs which were replicated using vSphere Replication is the fact that the vSphere Client didn’t show much information about the objects. You could not see how much capacity was consumed, or even to what the object belonged to. vSphere 7.0 changes this! When you go to the vSAN section under Monitoring you can now in the “Virtual Objects” pane not only see the objects, you can also easily identify to which VM they belong and you can easily see the different “point in time” copies associated with the VM.

On top of that, the Capacity overview also shows you these details under “User Objects”. Interested in what it looks like? Just watch the demo below, it is just under 2 minutes, a nice quick to-the-point overview of what was introduced for vSphere Replication in vSAN 7.0

 

Introducing vSAN File Services as part of vSAN 7.0

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There was a great article by Cormac talking about vSAN File Services published last week. I had some articles planned, but hadn’t started yet, so when I saw the article I figured I would do something different. No point in rehashing what Cormac has already shared right. I figured I would shoot another demo, and do a brief write-up so people know what vSAN File Services is all about. In vSAN/vSphere 7.0 there’s now a new feature, and this is vSAN File Services. vSAN File Services can simply be enabled on a cluster level and provides you NFS 3 and 4.1 capabilities. The great thing about the solution is that you can create file shares and associate policies with the file shares. In other words, you can have a file share with RAID-1, RAID-5, or maybe even striping or stretched across locations when that is supported.

When you enable File Services, vSAN will deploy a number of “agent VMs” and these VMs/appliances are fully managed by vSAN. These agent VMs run Photon OS and have the file services capabilities enabled through docker/container technology. After these File Service Agent VMs have been deployed, the docker container instances have been instantiated and configured, vSAN File Services will be up and running and available for use. Next, you could simply create a file share and start consuming it. But before I reveal everything, let’s just head over to the demo below. I hope you enjoy it!

vSAN Deep Dive – UK ebook promo started today!

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Today the vSAN Deep Dive ebook promo starts for the UK market! Unfortunately, Amazon only allows us to run these promotions in 2 stores, .com and .co.uk. So we scheduled them where possible. Starting today the ebook will be available on .co.uk for 0.99 pounds for a full week! So to be clear, it starts on the 20th of January and ends on the 27th! Pick it up here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/VMware-vSAN-6-7-Deep-Dive-ebook/dp/B07L8CNZ53/. After the 27th the book will return to the normal price. We hope you all will enjoy it.

vSAN Deep Dive Book Promotion! Price paper copy dropped by 50% and ebook as low as 0.99 USD!

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Amazon allows publishers to create book promotions and I just created one for the vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive ebook. The promotion starts on the 24th of December and will end on the 31st of December. The ebook promotion will be available only on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, as that is where Amazon allows publishers to create these. The price will start as low as 0.99 USD for the ebook in the US and will go up in increments of 1 USD over the course of 10 days, for the UK the price will start at 0.99 Pounds. The paper copy will also drop in price starting today and will return to normal on the 31st of December. (Note, unfortunately for the UK the ebook promo will start on the 20th of January, Amazon doesn’t allow me to schedule it sooner.) The paper copy will be discounted in all Amazon stores worldwide we have dropped the price by over 50%, in other words, for the US market you can pick it up for less than 20 USD, for EMEA it is less than 15 Euro. This should be a great deal to brush up your vSAN skills over the holiday season!

Make sure to pick a copy up using my referral links below:

Happy holidays!

Can I still provision VMs when a vSAN Stretched Cluster site has failed? Part II

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3 years ago I wrote the following post: Can I still provision VMs when a VSAN Stretched Cluster site has failed? Last week I received a question on this subject, and although officially I am not supposed to work on vSAN in the upcoming three months I figured I could test this in the evening easily within 30 minutes. The question was simple, in my blog I described the failure of the Witness Host, what if a single host fails in one of the two “data” fault domains? What if I want to create a snapshot for instance, will this still work?

So here’s what I tested:

  • vSAN Stretched Cluster
  • 4+4+1 configuration
    • Meaning, 4 hosts in each “data site” and a witness host, for a total of 8 hosts in my vSAN cluster
  • Create a VM with cross-site protection and RAID-5 within the location

So I first failed a host in one of the two data sites. When I fail the host, the following is what happens when I create a VM with RAID-1 across sites and RAID-5 within a site:

  • Without “Force Provisioning” enabled the creation of the VM fails
  • When “Force Provisioning” is enabled the creation of the VM succeeds, the VM is created with a RAID-0 within 1 location

Okay, so this sounds similar to the originally described scenario, in my 2016 blog post, where I failed the witness. vSAN will create a RAID-0 configuration for the VM. When the host returns for duty the RAID-1 across locations and RAID-5 within each location is then automatically created. On top of that, you can snapshot VMs in this scenario, the snapshots will also be created as RAID-0. One thing to mind is that I would recommend removing “force provisioning” from the policy after the failure has been resolved! Below is a screenshot of the component layout of the scenario by the way.

I also retried the witness host down scenario, and in that case, you do not need to use the “force provisioning” option. One more thing to note. The above will only happen when you create a RAID configuration which is impossible to create as a result of the failure. If 1 host fails in a 4+4+1 stretched cluster you would like to create a RAID-1 across sites and a RAID-1 within sites then the VM would be created with the requested RAID configuration, which is demonstrated in the screenshot below.