Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Unexplored Territory Episode 065 – Jatin Purohit discussing Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

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For episode 065 of the Unexplored Territory Podcast I invited Jatin Purohit to discuss Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and what was introduced since we had Richard Garsthagen on as a guest. Jatin went over all the details, and shared some great use cases with us. Make sure to listen to the episode via your favorite podcast app, or the embedded player below. We are now starting to plan for the upcoming episodes, if you want to be a guest and have an interesting story, or solution, to share, then do not hesitate to reach out.

 

Happy Holidays: vSAN 8.0 U1 Book Discounted to less than 5 USD for the ebook!

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Holidays are coming, so we figured it was time to lower the price of the vSAN ESA 8.0 U1 book! Haven’t bought it yet? The paper edition is around $ 19.99 and the ebook is $ 4.99 (or less, depending on where you live).

It’s a lot of great content for a really low price, and as said we made sure the ebook is priced extremely aggressively as we prefer for technical books not to be printed. Pick it up, the price will return to normal (29.99 and 9.99) after the holiday season!

Of course, we also have the links to other major Amazon stores:

Happy Holidays: vSAN 8.0 U1 Book Discounted to less than 5 USD for the ebook!

Doing network/ISL maintenance in a vSAN stretched cluster configuration!

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I got a question earlier about the maintenance of an ISL in a vSAN Stretched Cluster configuration which had me thinking for a while. The question was what would you do with your workload during maintenance. I guess the easiest of course is to power off all VMs and simply shutdown the cluster, for which vSAN has a UI option, and there’s a KB you can follow. Now, of course, there could also be a situation where the VMs need to remain running. But how does this work when you end up losing the connection between all three locations? Normally this would lead to a situation where all VMs will become “inaccessible” as you will end up losing quorum.

As said, this had me thinking, you could take advantage of the “vSAN Witness Resiliency” mechanism which was introduced in vSAN 7.0 U3. How would this work?

Well, it is actually pretty straight forward, if all hosts of 1 site are in maintenance mode, failed, or powered off, the votes of the witness object for each VM/Object will be recalculated within 3 minutes. When this recalculation has completed the witness can go down without having any impact on the VM. We introduced this capability to increase resiliency in a double-failure scenario, but we can (ab)use this functionality also during maintenance. Of course I had to test this, so the first step I took was placing all hosts in 1 location into maintenance mode (no data evac). This resulted in all my VMs being vMotioned to the other site.

Doing network/ISL maintenance in a vSAN stretched cluster configuration!

Now next I checked with RVC if my votes were recalculated or not. As stated, depending on the number of VMs this can take around 3 minutes in total, but usually will probably be quicker. After the recalculation had been completed I powered off the Witness, and this was the result as shown below, all VMs were still running.

Of course, I had to double check on the commandline using RVC (you can use the command “vsan.vm_object_info” to check a particular object for instance) to ensure that indeed the components of those VMs were still “ACTIVE” instead of “ABSENT”, and there you go!

Now when maintenance has been completed, you simply do the reverse, you power on the witness, and then you power on the hosts in the other location. After the “resync” has been completed the VMs will be rebalanced again by DRS. Note, DRS rebalancing (or should rules being applied) will only happen when the resync of the VM has been completed.

Call to action: Help cancer patients enjoy life when still possible!

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CALL TO ACTION: Everyone knows someone with cancer, who passed away as a result of cancer, or maybe even won the battle against cancer. I have seen too many family members and friends fight the battle and lose. For this reason, I decided to participate in the Roparun this year. The Roparun non-profit organization aims to help organizations (financially) in Holland that provide Palliative care for cancer patients.

I will join Team 243 to run from Paris to Rotterdam in a relay fashion next year (May 2024). We will be running with two groups of four people, each group will run in a relay fashion for 4 hours and will then have a 4 hour break, each runner will do 2 kilometers per repetition until the 4 hours has passed. This means it will take roughly 3 days to get back from Paris to Rotterdam. It is my goal to collect as many donations as possible to help cancer patients enjoy life when still possible, every contribution, small or large, is appreciated. I know I have helped many people over the years through my blogs, product feedback, videos, demos, books, and podcasts and many folks have asked if they could return the favor in the past. This is your chance to do so. Again, small or large, it does not matter, all help is appreciated!

All proceeds will go to charity! Please share, repost, and donate, all help is appreciated!
Folks from the Netherlands Holland please use: https://www.roparun.nl/fundraisers/duncan-epping
Folks outside of the Netherlands please use: https://www.gofundme.com/f/living-life-despite-cancer

Call to action: Help cancer patients enjoy life when still possible!

What does Datastore Sharing/HCI Mesh/vSAN Max support when stretched?

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This question has come up a few times now, what does Datastore Sharing/HCI Mesh/vSAN Max support when stretched? It is a question which keeps coming up somehow, and I personally had some challenges to find the statements in our documentation as well. I just found the statement and I wanted to first of all point people to it, and then also clarify it so there is no question. If I am using Datastore Sharing / HCI Mesh, or will be using vSAN Max, and my vSAN Datastore is stretched, what does VMware (or does not) support?

We have multiple potential combinations, let me list them and add whether it is supported or not, not that this is at the time of writing with the current available version (vSAN 8.0 U2).

  • vSAN Stretched Cluster datastore shared with vSAN Stretched Cluster –> Supported
  • vSAN Stretched Cluster datastore shared with vSAN Cluster (not stretched) –> Supported
  • vSAN Stretched Cluster datastore shared with Compute Only Cluster (not stretched) –> Supported
  • vSAN Stretched Cluster datastore shared with Compute Only Cluster (stretched, symmetric) –> Supported
  • vSAN Stretched Cluster datastore shared with Compute Only Cluster (stretched, asymmetric) –> Not Supported

So what is the difference between symmetric and asymmetric? The below image, which comes from the vSAN Stretched Configuration, explains it best. I think Asymmetric in this case is most likely, so if you are running Stretched vSAN and a Stretched Compute Only, it most likely is not supported.

What does Datastore Sharing/HCI Mesh/vSAN Max support when stretched?

This also applies to vSAN Max by the way. I hope that helps. Oh and before anyone asks, if the “server side” is not stretched it can be connected to a stretched environment and is supported.