Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

6.2

Intel Optane support for vSAN, first HCI solution to deliver it

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I am in Australia this week for the Sydney and Melbourne VMUG UserCon’s. Had a bunch of meetings yesterday and this morning the news was dropped that Intel Optane support was released for vSAN. The performance claims look great, 2.5x more IOPS and 2.5x less latency. (I don’t know the test specifics yet.) On top of that, Optane typically has a higher endurance rating, meaning that the device can incur a lot more writes, which makes it an ideal device for the vSAN caching layer.

While talking to customers the past couple of days though it was clear to me that performance is one thing, but flexibility of configuration is much more important. With vSAN you have the ability to select any server from the vSphere HCL and pick the components you want as long as they are on the vSAN HCL.  Or you can simply pick a ready node and swap components as needed. As long as the controller remains the same for a ready node you can do that. Either way, you have choice, and now with Optane being certified you can use the latest in flash technology with vSAN!

Oh for those paying attention, the Intel P4800X Optane device isn’t listed on the HCL yet. The database is being updated as we speak, and the device should be included soon!

Running a Witness Appliance on a 2 Node vSAN config with FT

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I have had various people asking, and to me it felt like an obvious answer, but as multiple have asked over the past couple of month I figured I would dedicate a post to it. The question is if it is supported to run the vSAN Witness Appliance for a 2 Node vSAN configuration on the 2 Node vSAN Configuration itself, but then with vSphere SMP-FT enabled on the Witness for extra protection.

The short answer: No, this is not supported.

The slightly longer answer: No, this is not supported. The vSAN Witness needs to run outside of the vSAN cluster it is acting as a witness for. The reason for this is fairly straight forward: Just imagine the vSAN hosts are partitioned and cannot talk to each other, yet both may have access to the Witness as a result of FT doing what it is designed to do. But those are different instances of the same Witness, which potentially can lead to all sorts of strange problems.

vSAN 6.x customer? vSphere 6.0 Update 3 is out

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Are you a vSAN 6.x customer? vSphere 6.0 Update 3 is out! There are a bunch of important fixes and improvements (checksumming performance for instance) in Update 3, so I would highly recommend looking in to it and testing it out.

Virtually Speaking Podcast – vSAN Customer Use Cases

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As John Nicholson was traveling in and around New Zealand I was asked by Pete if I could co-host the Virtually Speaking Podcast again. It is always entertaining to join, Pete is such a natural when it comes to these things. I euuh, well I do my best to keep up with him :). Below you can find the latest episode on the topic of vSAN Customer Use Cases. It includes a lot of soundbites recorded at VMware World Wide Kick Off / Tech Summit, which is a VMware internal event for all Sales, Pre-Sales and Post-Sales field facing people.

You can of course also subscribe on iTunes!

XenDesktop/XenApp 7.12 MCS works with vSAN

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This is something that has kept me busy for a while. For the past 2 years there were some challenges with regards to the use of MCS and XenDesktop/XenApp in combination with vSAN. In fact, Citrix never supported vSAN and MCS, and it actually did not work either. PVS worked great in combination with vSAN however. Some customers though prefer to use MCS. After various discussions, emails and engineering discussions it seems that the problem customers faced has finally been resolved.

Citrix recently announced a hotfix that will allow you to use MCS with XenDesktop/XenApp 7.12 and vSAN version 6.0, 6.2 or 6.5. You can find the hotfix and details here: https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX219670

I would like to thank a couple of folks for making this happen, from Citrix: Christian Reilly (Thanks for connecting me to everyone!), Vishal Ganeriwala, Paul Browne, Yuhua Lu, Rick Dehlinger, Amanda Austin and from VMware Weiguo He, Tony Kuo and Sophie Ting Yin. Thanks everyone for making this happen in between releases. I am certain our joint customers will appreciate this! Note, that it is not a full statement of support (yet), but a great step in the right direction!

For those interested in XenDesktop/XenApp with vSAN, make sure to read this great reference paper by Sophie Yin. It provides a lot of detail around performance etc.