What more do I need to say? vSphere 6.0 U1 was released today and it ships with Virtual SAN 6.1. By now you’ve all seen my posts on what’s new for VSAN 6.1 and you’ve hopefully seen the demo we created for stretched clustering. If you want to play with 6.1 yourself then you can find it here:
Software Defined
Virtual SAN Stretched Clustering demo
I posted about HA/DRS settings for VSAN Stretched Clustering yesterday and posted an intro to 6.1 and all new functionality which includes stretched clustering. As part of our VMworld session Rawlinson Rivera recorded a nice demo. We figured we should share it with the world, so I added the voice-over so at least it is clear what you are looking at and why certain things are configured in a specific way. I hope this demo shows how dead simple it is to configure VSAN stretched clustering, and how it handles a full site failure. Enjoy,
HA/DRS configuration with Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster environment
This question is going to come sooner or later, how do I configure HA/DRS when I am running a Virtual SAN Stretched cluster configuration. I described some of the basics of Virtual SAN stretched clustering in a what’s new for 6.1 post already, if you haven’t read it then I urge you to do so first. There are a couple of key things to know, first of all the latency between data sites that can be tolerated is 5ms and to the witness location ~100ms.
If you look at the picture you below you can imagine that when a VM sits in Fault Domain A and is reading from Fault Domain B that it could incur a latency of 5ms for each read IO. From a performance perspective we would like to avoid this 5ms latency, so for stretched clusters we introduce the concept of read locality. We don’t have this in a non-stretched environment, as there the latency is microseconds and not miliseconds. Now this “read locality” is something we need to take in to consideration when we configure HA and DRS.
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VMworld Virtual SAN slidedecks up on slideshare
I just posted the slidedecks that I presented at VMworld on Virtual SAN up on slideshare. The recording and the slides will probably at some point also show up on vmware.com but as I had many requests from people to share the material I figured I would do that straight after the event. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask.
NexentaConnect for VSAN for free? Get it now!
I was at VMworld last week and bumped in to the Nexenta team. They told me about this great promotion they are running (limited time!) for NexentaConnect. NexentaConnect provides you NFS storage on top of VSAN, Cormac wrote an article about it a while back which I suggest reading. The promotion gives you NexentaConnect for $ 0,- and that includes:
- NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN license (s)
- Unlimited raw storage capacity to match VMware VSAN Licenses
- Nexenta technical support for first 12 months included
Now I have seen many companies giving away software for free, but can’t recall having seen anyone include free support for 12 months. If you are a Virtual SAN user, or about to deploy/implement Virtual SAN, and looking to include some form of file services on top of it, then NexentaConnect may just be what you are looking for. I definitely recommend giving it a try, it is free and comes with support… what more can you ask for?
Have fun!