Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Software Defined

vSAN FS: Existing domain information has been pre-populated below

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I have been playing with vSAN File Services a lot the past couple of weeks. I have been configuration and re-configuring it a few times. At some point, I found myself in the situation where when I wanted to enable vSAN File Services and provide new IP details that I received the following error: “Existing domain information has been pre-populated below”. shown in the below screenshot.

Why did this happen? Well, the configuration details are stored in the objects that form the file shares. I disabled vSAN File Services while I still had file shares running. This then results in the scenario where when you enable vSAN File Services that it detects the file share objects, it will read the configuration details and assume that you will want to configure it with the same Domain/Network details so that you can access the existing shares. But what if you don’t? What if you want a brand new shiny environment? Well, that is also possible and you can do that as following:

  • Enable vSAN File Services with existing domain information
  • When configured, go to File Service Shares and delete all existing file shares
  • When all are deleted, disable vSAN File Services
  • When all tasks are complete, enable vSAN File Services again
  • Enter new Domain and Networking details

Pretty simple right?

vSAN File Services considerations

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I was looking into vSAN File Services this week as I had some customers asking about requirements and constraints. I wanted to list some of the things to understand about vSAN File Service as it is important when you are designing and configuring it. First of all, it is good to have an understanding of the implementation, well at least somewhat as vSAN File Services is managed/upgraded/update as part of vSAN. It is not an entity you as an admin, don’t manage the appliance you see deployed. I created a quick demo about vSAN File Services, which you can find here.

If you look at the diagram (borrowed from the VMware documentation) above, you can see that vSAN File Service leverages Agent/Appliance VMs and within each Agent VM a container, or “protocol stack”, is running. The protocol stack exposes the file system as an NFS file share. [Read more…] about vSAN File Services considerations

Scaling out your vSAN File Services Cluster

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This week I have been testing with vSAN File Services and one of the procedures I wanted to run through was scaling out my vSAN File Services cluster. In my case, I have a cluster of 5 hosts and what I want to do is add a host to my vSAN cluster, expand the vSAN Datastore and also grow my vSAN File Services cluster.

First of all, when you add a host into the cluster you need to make sure it is in maintenance mode. If if is not in maintenance mode then vSAN FS will instantly try to clone a vSAN File Services agent VM (FS VM) on to it and that process will fail as there’s no disk group yet. So make sure to place the host into maintenance mode before adding it to the cluster.

After you added it to the cluster, you have to create the disk group first. Claim all the disks that need to be part of the disk group and create the disk group. When you have done that you can take the host out of maintenance mode. Now the FS VM will be cloned and powered on. However, one thing you will need to do is expand the IP Pool for the vSAN FS Protocol Stack container. You can do this as follows:

  • Go to your cluster
  • Click on vSAN / Services
  • Go to File Service and click Edit on the right
  • Go to the IP Pool page by clicking Next twice
  • Add that additional IP address and DNS Name
  • Click Next / Finish

Now a new Protocol Stack Container can be instantiated in that new FS VM and your vSAN File Services cluster has been scaled out properly. I created a simple demo showing you what the process looks like, make sure to check it out below!

Creating a vSAN 7.0 Stretched Cluster

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A while ago I wrote this article and created this demo showing the creation of a vSAN Stretched Cluster. I bumped into the article/video today when I was looking for something and figured that it is time to recreate the vSAN Stretched Cluster demo. I recorded it today, using vSphere / vSAN 7, and just wanted to share it with you here. Hope you enjoy it.

Introducing vSAN File Services as part of vSAN 7.0

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There was a great article by Cormac talking about vSAN File Services published last week. I had some articles planned, but hadn’t started yet, so when I saw the article I figured I would do something different. No point in rehashing what Cormac has already shared right. I figured I would shoot another demo, and do a brief write-up so people know what vSAN File Services is all about. In vSAN/vSphere 7.0 there’s now a new feature, and this is vSAN File Service. vSAN File Services can simply be enabled on a cluster level and provides you NFS 3 and 4.1 capabilities. The great thing about the solution is that you can create file shares and associate policies with the file shares. In other words, you can have a file share with RAID-1, RAID-5, or maybe even striping or stretched across locations when that is supported.

When you enable File Service, vSAN will deploy a number of “agent VMs” and these VMs/appliances are fully managed by vSAN. These agent VMs run Photon OS and have the file service capabilities enabled through docker/container technology. After these File Service Agent VMs have been deployed, the docker container instances have been instantiated and configured, vSAN File Service will be up and running and available for use. Next, you could simply create a file share and start consuming it. But before I reveal everything, let’s just head over to the demo below. I hope you enjoy it!