by Duncan Epping
Duncan Epping · ·
I created this quick demo last week, and I figured I would share it here. It shows vSAN 7.0 U1 File Services with SMB and NFS support. I wrote about vSAN File Services and what is new in this post here, make sure to read that as well, and of course, it also details all the other introduced changes for vSAN 7.0 U1.
Duncan Epping · ·
As VMware has just done a major announcement (vSAN 7.0 U1 and vSphere 7.0U1), additional sessions have been added to the VMworld agenda. I already did a top 15 post not too long ago, so I figured I would create a short post that contains my 5 favorite sessions that were just added to the extensive list of available sessions at VMworld. Here we go:
Duncan Epping · ·
Every 6-9 months VMware has been pushing out a new feature release of vSAN. After vSphere and vSAN 7.0, which introduced vSphere Lifecycle Manager and vSAN File Services, it is now time to share with you what is new for vSAN 7.0 U1. Again it is a feature-packed release, with many “smaller enhancements, but also the introduction of some bigger functionality. Let’s just list the key features that have just been announced, and then discuss each of these individually. You better sit down, as this is going to be a long post. Oh, and note, this is an announcement, not the actual availability of vSAN 7.0 U1, for that you will have to wait some time.
Duncan Epping · ·
Internally someone just bumped into an issue where a single host in a cluster wasn’t storing any of the created vSAN Components / Objects. It was to the point where every single host in the cluster was close to the maximum of 9000 components, but that one host had 0 components. After some quick back and forth the following message stood out in the UI:
vSAN node decommission state
What does this mean? Well basically it means that from a vSAN stance this host is in maintenance mode. For whatever reason, the host itself from a hypervisor stance was not in maintenance mode, which means that the two were not in sync. This can simply be resolved by SSH’ing into the respective host and running the following command:
localcli vsan maintenancemode cancel
One thing to consider of course is to trigger a rebalance of the cluster after taking the host out of the decommissioned state when the environment is 6.7 U2 or lower, as that would result in a more equally balanced environment. Starting with 6.7 U3 this process is initiated automatically, when configured. There is a KB that describes how to trigger, and/or configure, to be found here.
Duncan Epping · ·
I was pointed out by a customer (thanks Johan), that vSphere FT is not supported when using SPBM on non-vSAN based storage systems. You may wonder why this is, at least I did wonder. I figured it would be a testing constraint of some sort, but after emailing product management, engineering, and our quality engineering team I now understand why it is. Now before I explain it, the constraint is documented here, let me quote the section for you:
Virtual Volume datastores.
Storage-based policy management. Storage policies are supported for vSAN storage.
So why is this and why would vSAN be supported as that also uses SPBM? Well the difference is in the implementation. For vVols there’s a dependency on vCenter Server to be available when creating new VMs. This is essentially what happens when an FT instance needs to be restarted. We will need to associate an SPBM policy with it and we can only retrieve it via vCenter Server. With vSAN, FT/HA can also retrieve the needed info via the ESXi host. This is why FT and vSAN are a supported configuration, and vVols and FT, unfortunately, is not at the moment. Hopefully, though, this will change in the future. (Yes, I filed a feature request before anyone asks.)