Just a quick note for those who hadn’t noticed yet. Virtual SAN went GA today, so get those download engines running and pull-in vSphere 5.5 Update 1. Below the direct links to the required builds:
- vCenter Server Update 1 downloads | release notes
- ESXi 5.5 Update 1 | release notes
- Horizon View 5.3.1 (VSAN specific release!) | release notes
- Horizon Workspace 1.8 | release notes
It looks like the HCL is being updated as we speak. The Dell T620 was just added as the first Virtual SAN ready node, and I expect many more to follow in the days to come. (Just published a white paper with multiple configurations.) Also the list of supported disk controllers has probably quadrupled.
A couple of KB Articles I want to call out:
- Horizon View 5.3.1 on VMware VSAN – Quickstart Guide
- Adding more than 16 hosts to a Virtual SAN cluster
- Virtual SAN node reached threshold of opened components
- Virtual SAN insufficient memory
- Storing ESXi coredump and scratch partitions in Virtual SAN
Two things I want to explicitly call out, first is around upgrades from Beta to GA:
Upgrade of Virtual SAN cluster from Virtual SAN Beta to Virtual SAN 5.5 is not supported.
Disable Virtual SAN Beta, and perform fresh installation of Virtual SAN 5.5 for ESXi 5.5 Update 1 hosts. If you were testing Beta versions of Virtual SAN, VMware recommends that you recreate data that you want to preserve from those setups on vSphere 5.5 Update 1. For more information, see Retaining virtual machines of Virtual SAN Beta cluster when upgrading to vSphere 5.5 Update 1 (KB 2074147).
The second is around Virtual SAN support when using unsupported hardware:
KB reference
Using uncertified hardware may lead to performance issues and/or data loss. The reason for this is that the behavior of uncertified hardware cannot be predicted. VMware cannot provide support for environments running on uncertified hardware.
Last but not least, a link to the documentation , a ;and of course a link to my VSAN page (vmwa.re/vsan) which holds a lot of links to great articles.
Doesn’t seem they bothered to fix this in update 1 either: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2061336
This is actually holding us back from upgrading, as we really hate that slow flash web interface.
So disappointing.
You better get used to the web interface, cause it is the way forward.
I know… I just wish they hadn’t built it around an outdated and slow technology like flash, but rather have used a non-plugin based web technology like HTML5.
In your white paper the Dell configuration has 14×1.2TB drives but you show 13.5 TB of capacity — all the others have a unit count * capacity — why the difference?
Don’t know, I didn’t write the paper 🙂