After attending the session Christos hosted at VMware Explore, Frank and I felt it would be a good idea to record a podcast with him. In this episode, we discuss the two relatively unknown products and projects, Project Moneta and VMware Data Service Manager. For those who don’t know, Christos used to be the CTO for Storage and Availability, and now is one of the two Fellow’s at VMware. Christos mainly focusses on data management, and how VMware can help customers solve their problems in this space. Listen via Spotify spoti.fi/3RvSniF, Apple apple.co/3SxMFOn, or just use the embedded player below.
vSAN File Services fails to create file share with error Failed to create the VDFS File System.
Last week on our internal slack channel one of the field folks had a question. He was hitting a situation where vSAN File Services failed when creating a file share with the error “Failed to create the VDFS File System”. We went back and forth a bit and after a while I jumped on Zoom to look at the issue, and troubleshoot the environment. After testing various combinations of policies I noticed that a particular policy worked, whole another policy did not. At first it looked like that stretched cluster policies would not work but after creating a new policy with a different name it did work. One thing left, the name of the policy. It appears that the use of special characters in the VM Storage Policy name results in the error “Failed to create the VDFS File System”. In this particular case the VM Storage Policy that was used was “stretched – mirrored FTT=1 RAID-1”. The character that was causing the issue was the “=” character.
How do you resolve it? Simply change the name of the policy. For instance, the following would work: “stretched – mirrored FTT1 RAID-1”.
Cleaning up old vSAN File Services OVF files on vCenter Server
There was a question last week about the vSAN File Services OVF Files, the question was about the location where they were stored. I did some digging in the past, but I don’t think I ever shared this. The vSAN File Services OVF is stored on vCenter Server (VCSA) in a folder, for each version. The folder structure looks as show below, basically each version of an OVF has a directory with required OVF files.
root@vcsa-duncan [ ~ ]# ls -lha /storage/updatemgr/vsan/fileService/ total 24K vsan-health users 4.0K Sep 16 16:09 . vsan-health root 4.0K Nov 11 2020 .. vsan-health users 4.0K Nov 11 2020 ovf-7.0.1.1000 vsan-health users 4.0K Mar 12 2021 ovf-7.0.2.1000-17692909 vsan-health users 4.0K Nov 24 2021 ovf-7.0.3.1000-18502520 vsan-health users 4.0K Sep 16 16:09 ovf-7.0.3.1000-20036589 root@vcsa-duncan [ ~ ]# ls -lha /storage/updatemgr/vsan/fileService/ovf-7.0.1.1000/ total 1.2G vsan-health users 4.0K Nov 11 2020 . vsan-health users 4.0K Sep 16 16:09 .. vsan-health users 179M Nov 11 2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758-cloud-components.vmdk vsan-health users 5.9M Nov 11 2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758-log.vmdk vsan-health users 573 Nov 11 2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758_OVF10.mf vsan-health users 60K Nov 11 2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758_OVF10.ovf vsan-health users 998M Nov 11 2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758-system.vmdk
I’ve asked the engineering team, and yes, you can simply delete obsolete versions if you need the disk capacity.
How to convert a standard cluster to a stretched cluster while expanding it!
On VMTN a question was asked about how you could convert a 5-node standard cluster to a stretched cluster. It is not documented in our regular documentation, probably as the process is pretty straightforward, so I figured I would write it down. When you create a stretched cluster you will need a Witness Appliance in a third location first. I would recommend deploying that Witness Appliance before doing anything else.
After you deployed the Witness Appliance add the additional hosts to vCenter Server. DO NOT yet add them to the cluster yet though! First, configure each host separately. After you have configured each host, place the host into maintenance mode. After the host is placed into maintenance mode, move it into the cluster and do not take it out of maintenance mode!
Now, when all hosts are part of the cluster you can create the Stretched Cluster. This process is simple, you pick the hosts that belong to each location, and then you select the witness. After the cluster has been created you simply take the hosts out of maintenance mode and you should be good! Note, you take the host out of maintenance after the Stretched Cluster has been created to ensure that you don’t have any rebalancing happening while you are creating the stretched cluster. Simply avoiding unneeded resyncs from occuring.
Do note, all VMs will have the same storage policy assigned still, so you will need to change that policy to ensure that the vSAN objects are placed and replicated according to your requirements! (RAID1 across locations and RAID-1/5/6 within a location for instance.)
Running with power, using a Stryd footpod
A month ago or so I posted a thread on twitter that discusses my experience of using the Stryd footpod. I figured I would dump it in a blog post so that it doesn’t get lost. I’ve noticed various questions on twitter and facebook groups lately about the Stryd footpod and running with power. Questions that can easily be answered in my opinion, I will add some of those basic questions to the end of this blog.
So what is Stryd and what does it provide? Stryd is a hardware device, that contains many sensors, combined with an ML/analytics platform. The hardware device is a footpod, and it measures your output and running capabilities. That data is then analyzed and your specific training zones are calculated and race results can be estimated. These training zones can then be used to improve your endurance and pace using a single metric!
Stryd displays watts as their key metric, very similar to what a cyclist sees when using a power meter. The benefit of this is that you can use this “watt” metric to for instance pace a race, run intervals, or run a full workout at a particular effort. Of course, you could use pace ranges as well or heart rate, and people have been doing that for many years. However, heart rate typically takes time to ramp up, so during an interval the delay of the heart rate could mean you run in the wrong zone (too slow, or too fast). Pace ranges avoid that problem, but you’ll need to understand your capabilities extremely well to determine those ranges in combination with effort. This can be challenging for advanced runners, let alone beginning runners. [Read more…] about Running with power, using a Stryd footpod