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vSphere

Using HCI Mesh with a stand-alone vSphere host?

Duncan Epping · Apr 13, 2021 · Leave a Comment

Last week at the French VMUG we received a great question. The question was whether you can use HCI Mesh (datastore sharing) with a stand-alone vSphere Host. The answer is simple, no you cannot. VMware does not support enabling vSAN, and HCI Mesh, on a single stand-alone host. However, if you still want to mount a vSAN Datastore from a single vSphere host, there is a way around this limitation.

First, let’s list the requirements:

  1. The host needs to be managed by the same vCenter Server as the vSAN Cluster
  2. The host needs to be under the same virtual datacenter as the vSAN Cluster
  3. Low latency, high bandwidth connection between the host and the vSAN Cluster

If you meet these requirements, then what you can do to mount the vSAN Datastore to a single host is the following:

  1. Create a cluster without any services enabled
  2. Add the stand-alone host to the cluster
  3. Enable vSAN, select “vSAN HCI Mesh Compute Cluster”
  4. Mount the datastore

Note, when you create a cluster and add a host, vCenter/EAM will try to provision the vCLS VM. Of course this VM is not really needed as HA and DRS are not useful with a single host cluster. So what you can do is enable “retreat mode”. For those who don’t know how to do this, or those who want to know more about vCLS, read this article.

As I had to test the above in my lab, I also created a short video demonstrating the workflow, watch it below.

vSphere Native Key Provider backup not working

Duncan Epping · Apr 7, 2021 · Leave a Comment

I had three people asking this question the past few weeks, they were trying to configure the vSphere Native Key Provider so that they could enable vSAN Encryption, but the backup function wasn’t working. If you have not seen the Native Key Provider in action yet, just watch the video below.

As demonstrated in the video, when you configure the vSphere Native Key provider, you need to back up the key first before you can use it. Now, as mentioned, I had a few folks asking the past weeks why they couldn’t back up the key. The reason for it is simple, when you configure the Native Key Provider and want to back it up, you need to access the vSphere UI via the fully qualified domain name. In other words, when you access the H5 UI via the IP address of the vCenter Server, then the backup function won’t work. Also, when you have multiple vCenter Server instances in Linked Mode, you need to make sure you access the correct vCenter Server, the vCenter Server instance on which the Native Key Provider is enabled. Isn’t all of this documented? Yes, it is! But who reads documentation these days right?

vSAN File Services and Stretched Clusters!

Duncan Epping · Mar 29, 2021 · Leave a Comment

As most of you probably know, vSAN File Services is not supported on a stretched cluster with vSAN 7.0 or 7.0U1. However, starting with vSAN 7.0 U2 we now fully support the use of vSAN File Services on a stretched cluster configuration! Why is that?

In 7.0 U2, you now have the ability to specify during configuration of vSAN File Services to which site certain IP addresses belong. In other words, you can specify the “site affinity” of your File Service services. This is shown in the screenshot below. Now I do want to note, this is a soft affinity rule. Meaning that if hosts, or VMs, fail on which these file services containers are running it could be that the container is restarted in the opposite location. Again, a soft rule, not a hard rule!

Of course, that is not the end of the story. You also need to be able to specify for each share with which location they have affinity. Again, you can do this during configuration (or edit it afterward if desired), and this basically then sets the affinity for the file share to a location. Or said differently, it will ensure that when you connect to file share, one of the file servers in the specified site will be used. Again, this is a soft rule, meaning that if none of the file servers are available on that site, you will still be able to use vSAN File Services,  just not with the optimized data path you defined.

Hopefully, that gives a quick overview of how you can use vSAN File Services in combination with a vSAN Stretched Cluster.  I created a video to demonstrate these new capabilities, you can watch it below.

Compute only HCI Mesh with vSAN 7.0 U2

Duncan Epping · Mar 16, 2021 · 10 Comments

I guess that title explains it all, starting with vSAN 7.0 U2, we now also support connecting a compute-only cluster with a vSAN cluster. Meaning that if you have a vSphere cluster that does not have vSAN enabled, you can now mount a remote vSAN Datastore to it and leverage all the capabilities it provides!

I am sure seeing this new capability will make many of you happy, as we had many customers asking for this when we launched HCI Mesh with vSAN 7.0 U1. The great thing is that there’s no need for a vSAN license on the compute-only cluster, even though we load up the vSAN Client on the Client Cluster. No, we are not using NFS, but we are using the vSAN proprietary protocol for this. Another thing that may be useful to know is that we doubled the number of hosts that can be connected to a single datastore, this has gone from 64 to 128!

Last but not least, we have also extended the Policy Based Management Framework to allow for customers to specify which data services should be enabled on a datastore level. So if you select a policy, the vSAN datastores that will be presented, should not only be able to provide the RAID configuration specified, but should also have the data services enabled you require. Those data services would be: Deduplication and Compression, Compression, and/or Encryption, as shown in screenshot of the new policy capability below.

As mentioned, the feature itself is pretty straightforward and very easy to use. There are some things to take into consideration, of course, I wrote those down here. If you want to see it in action, make sure to check the demo below.

I joined the Futr Tech Podcast last week, check out the episode here!

Duncan Epping · Feb 16, 2021 · Leave a Comment

Last week I had the pleasure of joining Chris and Sandesh on the Futr Tech podcast. The episode was just published online, and I wanted to share it with all of you via this blog post. Make sure to watch/listen to the episode and subscribe to the youtube channel or podcast. I’ve been following these guys for a while, and there are some very interesting conversations to check out. (I enjoyed the episode with Bipul Sinha very much.)

You can find them on youtube here, or add them to your podcast app of choice (buzzsprout, spotify, itunes) I had fun, looking forward to some more podcasting in 2021!

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007) and the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive" and the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series.

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