Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vSAN

vSAN to vSAN Replication and Recovery Plan creation demo!

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As I was going through the various recordings I had of demos I created for Explore, I realized I hadn’t published the demos I created for vSAN to vSAN Replication, and on creating a Recovery Plan based on a vSAN Protection Group in VMware Live Recovery. So here it is. It is a pretty lengthy video as I go through all the various steps involved. So what you will see in this demo is the following:

  • vCenter Server Pairing between my 2 sites
  • Cluster pairing
  • Creation of a vSAN Protection Group, including vSAN to vSAN Replication
  • Creation of a Recovery Plan based on the previously created Protection Group
  • Test of the Recovery Plan

What happens after a Site Takeover when my failed sites come back online again?

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I got a question after the previous demo: what would happen if, after a Site Takeover, the two failed sites came back online again? I completely ignored this part of the scenario so far, I am not even sure why. I knew what would happen, but I wanted to test it anyway to confirm that what engineering had described actually happened. For those who cannot be bothered to watch a demo, what happens when the two failed sites come back online again is pretty straightforward. The “old” components of the impacted VMs are discarded, vSAN will recreate the RAID configuration as specified within the associated vSAN Storage Policy, and then a full resync will occur so that the VM is compliant again with the policy. Let me repeat one part: a full resync will occur! So if you do a Site Takeover, I hope you do understand what the impact will be. A full resync will take time, of course, depending on the connection between the data locations.

Does a Site Takeover work with a 2-node configuration?

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I got a question last week if vSAN Site Takeover also works with a 2-node configuration, and my answer was: yes, it should work. However, I had never tested it, so I figured I would build a quick lab environment and see if I was right. I recorded the result, here it is! The demo is pretty straight forward, let me describe what you will see:

  • 2-node vSAN environment
  • 1 VM named “photon-001”
  • Photon-001 VM is “stretched” across both hosts and has a witness component on the witness host
  • Host “.245” and the witness will fail and the components on those hosts will go “absent”
  • Photon-001 VM becomes inaccessible
  • We run the site-takeover command, which will reconfigure the Photon-001 VM
  • The Photon-001 VM becomes available again and it automatically restarted

vSAN 9.0 Site Maintenance Mode demo!

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I had a few questions about this, so I figured I would record a quick demo showing Site Maintenance. In the demo, I have a stretched cluster configured in vSAN 9.0, and I am going to place the Preferred Site into maintenance mode. First a pre-check will occur to verify all workloads are replicated between locations, and then the site is placed into maintenance while maintaining data consistency across hosts. Next demo I will record will show the Manual Site Takeover command that was also introduced in 9.0 for OSA, but will be also available soon for ESA.