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?
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
#108 – My Explore recap: VCF Native S3 Object Storage, Cyber Recovery, and vSAN on FC!
I had some difficulties scheduling guests the past weeks due to my travel schedule, and as a result, I figured I would try something new. In this episode, I go over the various things I announced at Explore and Explore on Tour in London, Paris, and Frankfurt. I talk about VCF Native S3 Object Storage, the enhancements we are planning for Disaster Recovery as well as Cyber Recovery, and I also briefly touch on vSAN on FC.
You can listen to my solo episode, episode 108, on Spotify (bit.ly/3MxRyZC), Apple Podcasts (bit.ly/4iEM5ML), or via the embedded player on Yellow-Bricks below.
If you like to hear more about vSAN ESA Global Deduplication, make sure to go to this blog on Yellow-Bricks, as it contains the links to the discussion Pete Koehler and I had on the show a while back. I also just published the demo I recorded for Explore on Youtube, make sure to watch that one!
I also had Jatin Jindal on the show a month or two ago to discuss all Ransomware/Cyber Recovery enhancements in-depth. You can listen to that episode via Spotify (bit.ly/3IWQCwz), Apple (bit.ly/4o6YVoG), or via the embedded player on yellow-bricks.com!
vSAN OSA 9.0 Site Takeover demo!
I posted the Site Maintenance demo, so I figured I would also do a post for the Site Takeover feature. I described those features in a few posts. So make sure to read that if you don’t know what it is about. If you already know, but haven’t seen a demo yet, here you go:
vSAN 9.0 Site Maintenance Mode demo!
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.