Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Search Results for: vsan

Introducing vSphere+ and vSAN+

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VMware just announced vSphere+ and vSAN+ today. I was reading up on the offering and personally was very intrigued about it. I have to be fair, at first I was under the impression that vSphere+ and vSAN+ was only about subscription-based licensing, but it is not, it is much more than that. If you like to head more about it, Frank and I invited Himanshu Singh to the podcast to provide us a quick overview, in ~20 minutes you know everything you need to know at this stage, make sure to listen to it below or open up the podcast in your favorite podcast app.

I am not going to type up a summary of the podcast, but I do briefly want to share my thoughts. First of all, as mentioned already, vSphere+ aka Project Arctic is about much more than just subscription-based licensing. Yes, the platform is subscription-based, but it also delivers additional capabilities to your on-prem environment. Details of pricing and packaging is still to be announced, but Himanshu mentioned to us that VMware will provide an upgrade path from perpetual licenses to vSphere+ taking into account that you have already bought licenses. Mind, most of you renew SnS every X years, this would be also included in vSphere+. But that is not what excited me, what excited me is that you get access to the Cloud Console, which basically provides a holistic overview of your VMware estate, with today a focus on vSphere and vSAN, and the extra capabilities the platform provides.

This Cloud Console is, no surprise I guess, running in the cloud and connects your on-prem VMware environment to cloud services. In order to do so, you will need to deploy a Cloud Gateway and connect your vCenter Server instances to the gateway, do note that each Cloud Gateway in the initial release can manage up to 4 vCenter Server instances. You can, however, deploy multiple Cloud Gateway of course if you want to manage more vCenter Server instances.

Now, when you get access to the Cloud Console, it immediately shows you what the value is, you will get an instant overview of all resources available in your VMware environment. Not only that, but you will also get centralized alerts and events, a global inventory, VM provisioning capabilities, and enhanced vCenter upgrade capabilities, which is my favorite feature! This upgrade capability is very useful as it shortens the downtime/maintenance window for vCenter to roughly 5 minutes. It also provides the ability to do a rollback if needed. There’s much more, but I will leave that for a follow up podcast with one of the vSphere+ specialists!

The two last things I want to point out is the fact that additional services will also be provided through this platform. There are the Developer Services and there are Add-On Services. The Developer Services are included, the Add-On services are not included in the price, but are fully integrated and can be subscribed to individually. A great example of an add-on service is VMware Disaster Recovery as a Service solution. Of course, developer services is all about Kubernetes as it includes Tanzu Standard Runtime, and Tanzu Mission Control Essentials!

Hopefully this provides a decent enough overview of what vSphere+ is. Make sure to listen to the podcast episode, it is only ~20 minutes and it provides a bit more background and detail!

Nested Fault Domains on a 2-Node vSAN Stretched Cluster, is it supported?

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I spotted a question this week on VMTN, the question was fairly basic, are nested fault domains supported on a 2-node vSAN Stretched Cluster? It sounds basic, but unfortunately, it is not documented anywhere, probably because stretched 2-node configurations are not very common. For those who don’t know, with a nested fault domain on a two-node cluster you basically provide an additional layer of resiliency by replicating an object within a host as well. A VM Storage Policy for a configuration like that will look as follows.

This however does mean that you would need to have a minimum of 3 fault domains within your host as well if you want to, this means that you will need to have a minimum of 3 disk groups in each of the two hosts as well. Or better said, when you configure Host Mirroring and then select the second option failures to tolerate the following list will show you the number of disk groups per host you need at a minimum:

  • Host Mirroring – 2 Node Cluster
    • No Data Redundancy – 1 disk group
    • 1 Failure – RAID1 – 3 disk groups
    • 1 Failure – RAID5 – 4 disk groups
    • 2 Failures – RAID1 – 5 disk groups
    • 2 Failures – RAID6 – 6 disk groups
    • 3 Failures – RAID1 – 7 disk groups

If you look at the list, you can imagine that if you need additional resiliency it will definitely come at a cost. But anyway, back to the question, is it supported when your 2-node configuration happens to be stretched across locations, and the answer is yes, VMware supports this.

Where do I download the vSAN File Service OVA?

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Last few weeks I had this question at least three times, surprisingly as I thought it wasn’t too difficult to find. The question was if my vCenter Server has no connection to the internet, where do I download the vSAN File Service OVA file that I can use to setup vSAN File Service manually? The UI provides the option to manually load it, but doesn’t provide a pointer to the location on the website where you can download it.

And actually, it is fairly simple, you go to vmware.com/downloads. You pick “VMware vSAN” as the product, then click on the “Drivers & Tools” tab, and then unfold “VMware vSAN Tools, Plug-ins and Appliances” and you should see the OVAs listed for the various versions. After you download the OVA, you can simply upload it from your desktop via the vCenter Server UI and continue the configuration of vSAN File Service.

New book: VMware vSAN 7.0 U3 Deep Dive

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Yes, we’ve mentioned it a few times already on Twitter that we were working on it, but today Cormac and I are proud to announce that the VMware vSAN 7.0 U3 Deep Dive is available via Amazon on both ebook as well as paper! We had the pleasure of working with Pete Koehler again as a technical editor, the foreword was written by John Gilmartin (SVP and GM for Cloud Storage and Data), the cover was created by my son (Aaron Epping), and it is once again fully self-published! We changed the format (physical dimension) of the book to be able to increase the size of the screenshots, as we realize that most of us are middle-aged by now, we feel it really made a huge difference in readability.

VMware’s vSAN has rapidly proven itself in environments ranging from hospitals to oil rigs to e-commerce platforms and is the top player in the hyperconverged space. Along the way, it has matured to offer unsurpassed features for data integrity, availability, space efficiency, stretched clustering, and cloud-native storage services. vSAN 7.0 U3 has radically simplified IT operations and supports the transition to hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI). The authors of the vSAN Deep Dive have thoroughly updated their definitive guide to this transformative technology. Writing for vSphere administrators, architects, and consultants, Cormac Hogan, and Duncan Epping explain what vSAN is, how it has evolved, what it now offers, and how to gain maximum value from it. The book offers expert insight into preparation, installation, configuration, policies, provisioning, clusters, architecture, and more. You’ll also find practical guidance for using all data services, stretched clusters, two-node configurations, and cloud-native storage services.

Although we pressed publish, sometimes it takes a while before the book is available in all Amazon stores, but it should just trickle in the upcoming 24-48 hours. The book is priced at 9.99 USD (ebook) and 29.99 USD (paper) and is sold through Amazon only. Get it while it is hot, and we would appreciate it if you would use our referral links and leave a review when you finish it. Thanks, and we hope you will enjoy it!

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

Stretched cluster witness failure resilience in vSAN 7.0

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Cormac and I have been busy the past couple of weeks updating the vSAN Deep Dive to 7.0 U3. Yes, there is a lot to update and add, but we are actually going through it at a surprisingly rapid pace. I guess it helps that we had already written dozens of blog posts on the various topics we need to update or add. One of those topics is “witness failure resilience” which was introduced in vSAN 7.0 U3. I have discussed it before on this blog (here and here) but I wanted to share some of the findings with you folks as well before the book is published. (No, I do not know when the book will be available on Amazon just yet!)

In the scenario below, we failed the secondary site of our stretched cluster completely. We can examine the impact of this failure through RVC on vCenter Server. This will provide us with a better understanding of the situation and how the witness failure resilience mechanism actually works. Note that the below output has been truncated for readability reasons. Let’s take a look at the output of RVC for our VM directly after the failure.

VM R1-R1:
Disk backing:
[vsanDatastore] 0b013262-0c30-a8c4-a043-005056968de9/R1-R1.vmx
RAID_1
RAID_1
Component: 0b013262-c2da-84c5-1eee-005056968de9 , host: 10.202.25.221
votes: 1, usage: 0.1 GB, proxy component: false)
Component: 0b013262-3acf-88c5-a7ff-005056968de9 , host: 10.202.25.201
votes: 1, usage: 0.1 GB, proxy component: false)
RAID_1
Component: 0b013262-a687-8bc5-7d63-005056968de9 , host: 10.202.25.238
votes: 1, usage: 0.1 GB, proxy component: true)
Component: 0b013262-3cef-8dc5-9cc1-005056968de9 , host: 10.202.25.236
votes: 1, usage: 0.1 GB, proxy component: true)
Witness: 0b013262-4aa2-90c5-9504-005056968de9 , host: 10.202.25.231
votes: 3, usage: 0.0 GB, proxy component: false)
Witness: 47123362-c8ae-5aa4-dd53-005056962c93 , host: 10.202.25.214
votes: 1, usage: 0.0 GB, proxy component: false)
Witness: 0b013262-5616-95c5-8b52-005056968de9 , host: 10.202.25.228
votes: 1, usage: 0.0 GB, proxy component: false)

As can be seen, the witness component holds 3 votes, the components on the failed site (secondary) hold 2 votes, and the components on the surviving data site (preferred) hold 2 votes. After the full site failure has been detected, the votes are recalculated to ensure that a witness host failure does not impact the availability of the VMs. Below shows the output of RVC once again.

VM R1-R1:
Disk backing:
[vsanDatastore] 0b013262-0c30-a8c4-a043-005056968de9/R1-R1.vmx
RAID_1
RAID_1
Component: 0b013262-c2da-84c5-1eee-005056968de9 , host: 10.202.25.221
votes: 3, usage: 0.1 GB, proxy component: false)
Component: 0b013262-3acf-88c5-a7ff-005056968de9 , host: 10.202.25.201
votes: 3, usage: 0.1 GB, proxy component: false)
RAID_1
Component: 0b013262-a687-8bc5-7d63-005056968de9 , host: 10.202.25.238
votes: 1, usage: 0.1 GB, proxy component: false)
Component: 0b013262-3cef-8dc5-9cc1-005056968de9 , host: 10.202.25.236
votes: 1, usage: 0.1 GB, proxy component: false)
Witness: 0b013262-4aa2-90c5-9504-005056968de9 , host: 10.202.25.231
votes: 1, usage: 0.0 GB, proxy component: false)
Witness: 47123362-c8ae-5aa4-dd53-005056962c93 , host: 10.202.25.214
votes: 3, usage: 0.0 GB, proxy component: false)

As can be seen, the votes for the various components have changed, the data site now has 3 votes per component instead of 1, the witness on the witness host went from 3 votes to 1, and on top of that, the witness that is stored in the surviving fault domain now also has 3 votes instead of 1 vote. This now results in a situation where quorum would not be lost even if the witness component on the witness host is impacted by a failure. A very useful enhancement to vSAN 7.0 Update 3 for stretched cluster configurations if you ask me.