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by Duncan Epping

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vSAN

Essential Virtual SAN book available as of today! (ebook first)

Duncan Epping · Jul 11, 2014 ·

Yes, the day has finally come… Our pet project, the Essential Virtual SAN book is finally out! Cormac and I decided to take the “e-book first” route which enables us to have it out weeks before the printed copy. Before doing the thank you’s and provide you with some details on what the book is about, I want to thank my co-author Cormac! It was a great pleasure working with you on this project Cormac, thanks for asking me to be part of this exciting book!

We want to thank our technical editors Paudie O’Riordan and Christos Karamanolis, whom spent countless of hours reading and editing our raw materials. We would like to thank the VMware Virtual SAN engineering team for the countless of hours discussing the ins and outs of Virtual SAN. Especially Christian Dickmann and (again) Christos Karamanolis, it would not have been possible without your help! We also want to acknowledge William Lam, Wade Holmes, Rawlinson Rivera, Simon Todd, Alan Renouf, and Jad El-Zein for their help and contributions to the book. Last but not least we want to thank the Pearson team for their flexibility and agility and getting things done, and our management (Phil Weiss, Adam Zimman, and Mornay van der Walt) for supporting us on this journey.!

Cormac and I are also very pleased to say that we have two awesome forewords by no one less than VMware CTO Ben Fathi and SVP of Storage and Availability at VMware Charles Fan! Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule, we very much appreciate it.

What does the book cover?

Understand and implement VMware Virtual SAN: the heart of tomorrow’s Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC)

VMware’s breakthrough Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) initiative can help you virtualize your entire datacenter: compute, storage, networks, and associated services. Central to SDDC is VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN): a fully distributed storage architecture seamlessly integrated into the hypervisor and capable of scaling to meet any enterprise storage requirement.

Now, the leaders of VMware’s wildly popular Virtual SAN previews have written the first authoritative guide to this pivotal technology. You’ll learn what Virtual SAN is, exactly what it offers, how to implement it, and how to maximize its value.

Writing for administrators, consultants, and architects, Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping show how Virtual SAN implements both object-based storage and a policy platform that simplifies VM storage placement. You’ll learn how Virtual SAN and vSphere work together to dramatically improve resiliency, scale-out storage functionality, and control over QoS.

Both an up-to-the-minute reference and hands-on tutorial, Essential Virtual SAN uses realistic examples to demonstrate Virtual SAN’s most powerful capabilities. You’ll learn how to plan, architect, and deploy Virtual SAN successfully, avoid gotchas, and troubleshoot problems once you’re up and running.

Coverage includes

  • Understanding the key goals and concepts of Software-Defined Storage and Virtual SAN technology
  • Meeting physical and virtual requirements for safe Virtual SAN implementation
  • Installing and configuring Virtual SAN for your unique environment
  • Using Storage Policy Based Management to control availability, performance, and reliability
  • Simplifying deployment with VM Storage Policies
  • Discovering key Virtual SAN architectural details: caching I/O, VASA, witnesses, pass-through RAID, and more
  • Ensuring efficient day-to-day Virtual SAN management and maintenance
  • Interoperating with other VMware features and products
  • Designing and sizing Virtual SAN clusters
  • Troubleshooting, monitoring, and performance optimization

ASIN: B00LODTZSA
ISBN-10: 013385499X
ISBN-13: 978-0133854992

You can buy it via Amazon.com for Kindle, and it will also be available shortly via Pearson.com for any other ebook format!

Disk Controllers removed from VSAN HCL

Duncan Epping · Jul 6, 2014 ·

For those who are running VSAN in their environment, I would urge you to have a look at this KB article: Storage Controllers previously supported for VSAN that are no longer supported (2081431). This KB article describes a list of disk controllers which have been removed from the VSAN HCL because of the shallow queue depth. I described in an article a while back “Why Queue Depth matters” and this is also reiterated by Rakesh from VSAN product management in this blog article on the vSphere blog.

If you have purchased Virtual SAN for use with these controllers, please contact VMware customer care for next steps.

Public vSphere Beta, sign up and provide feedback now!

Duncan Epping · Jul 1, 2014 ·

I am very pleased to see VMware just announced the beta of vSphere. I think it is great that everyone has the chance to sign up, download it, test it and provide feedback on such a critical part of your environment! Who doesn’t love to play with cutting edge technology? I know I do! Especially for all the bloggers and book authors out there this is an excellent opportunity to already start working on articles (or a book) for the launch time frame, whenever that will be. I have my engines fired up, downloading the bits as I write this…

How do you join?

  •  Navigate to https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere-beta and click “JOIN NOW!” button on the right hand side!
  • Log in with your My VMware account.  (Please register for an account if you don’t have one).
  • Once you have an account and are logged in, please accept the Master Software Beta Test Agreement (MSBTA) and Program Rules screens if you have not already done so in the past.
  • After doing this you should be in the vSphere Beta 2 community.

There are 2 webinars coming up, which I would recommend attending:

  • Introduction / Overview – Tuesday, July 8, 2014
  • Installation & Upgrade – Thursday, July 10, 2014

One of the features, which is part of the beta, that I am excited about is Virtual Volumes. I have written about this concept a bunch of times (here and here) and I hope you folks will appreciate this feature as much as I do. If you are interested, look at this VVOL Beta page. You may wonder, why a separate page for VVOL beta? Well that is because you will need a VVOL capable storage solution…

Reminder: Before anyone forgets, the vSphere Beta is open to public but it is NOT a public beta. It still is a private beta and NDA applies!

Quick pointer to new Virtual SAN Ready Node configs

Duncan Epping · Jun 23, 2014 ·

Just a quick pointer to the new document that holds all Virtual SAN Ready Node configurations: Virtual SAN Ready Node.pdf. In this document various new configurations are described and a couple of old ready node configurations appear to have been removed. I expect these new configurations to be added in the upcoming weeks.

Another very useful document recently released on the topic of Virtual SAN hardware is the following: Virtual SAN Hardware Quick Reference Guide. It describes for both Server and VDI workloads different profiles and give examples around how you should configure your hardware to meet certain requirements.

Disconnect a host from VSAN cluster doesn’t change capacity?

Duncan Epping · Jun 13, 2014 ·

Someone asked this question on VMTN this week and I received a similar question this week from another user… If you disconnect a host from a VSAN cluster it doesn’t change the total amount of available capacity. The customer was wondering why this was. Well the answer is simple: You are not disconnecting the host from your VSAN cluster, but you are rather disconnecting it from vCenter Server instead! (In contrary to HA and DRS by the way) In other words: your VSAN host is still providing storage to the VSAN datastore when it is disconnected.

If you want a host to leave a VSAN cluster you have two options in my opinion:

  • Place it in maintenance mode with full data migration and remove it from the cluster
  • Run the following command from the ESXi command line:
    esxcli vsan cluster leave

Please keep that in mind when you do maintenance… Do not use “disconnect” but actually remove the host from the cluster if you do not want it to participate in VSAN any longer.

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About the Author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist and Distinguished Engineering Architect at Broadcom. Besides writing on Yellow-Bricks, Duncan is the co-author of the vSAN Deep Dive and the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book series. Duncan is also the host of the Unexplored Territory Podcast.

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