Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

7.0

vSAN File Services considerations

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I was looking into vSAN File Services this week as I had some customers asking about requirements and constraints. I wanted to list some of the things to understand about vSAN File Service as it is important when you are designing and configuring it. First of all, it is good to have an understanding of the implementation, well at least somewhat as vSAN File Services is managed/upgraded/update as part of vSAN. It is not an entity you as an admin, don’t manage the appliance you see deployed. I created a quick demo about vSAN File Services, which you can find here.

If you look at the diagram (borrowed from the VMware documentation) above, you can see that vSAN File Service leverages Agent/Appliance VMs and within each Agent VM a container, or “protocol stack”, is running. The protocol stack exposes the file system as an NFS file share. [Read more…] about vSAN File Services considerations

Scaling out your vSAN File Services Cluster

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This week I have been testing with vSAN File Services and one of the procedures I wanted to run through was scaling out my vSAN File Services cluster. In my case, I have a cluster of 5 hosts and what I want to do is add a host to my vSAN cluster, expand the vSAN Datastore and also grow my vSAN File Services cluster.

First of all, when you add a host into the cluster you need to make sure it is in maintenance mode. If if is not in maintenance mode then vSAN FS will instantly try to clone a vSAN File Services agent VM (FS VM) on to it and that process will fail as there’s no disk group yet. So make sure to place the host into maintenance mode before adding it to the cluster.

After you added it to the cluster, you have to create the disk group first. Claim all the disks that need to be part of the disk group and create the disk group. When you have done that you can take the host out of maintenance mode. Now the FS VM will be cloned and powered on. However, one thing you will need to do is expand the IP Pool for the vSAN FS Protocol Stack container. You can do this as follows:

  • Go to your cluster
  • Click on vSAN / Services
  • Go to File Service and click Edit on the right
  • Go to the IP Pool page by clicking Next twice
  • Add that additional IP address and DNS Name
  • Click Next / Finish

Now a new Protocol Stack Container can be instantiated in that new FS VM and your vSAN File Services cluster has been scaled out properly. I created a simple demo showing you what the process looks like, make sure to check it out below!

Install and Configure vSphere Replication with SRM 8.3 on vSphere 7

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I haven’t really done much with vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager (SRM) in the past years as my main focus has been vSAN. I figured I would get two clusters up and running and install and configure both vSphere Replication as well as SRM on top of vSphere 7. Although the installation and configuration are pretty straight forward, there are a few steps which are important. Below the steps I took to get things up and running.

  • Deploy the vSphere Replication appliance in both clusters
  • Deploy the Site Recovery Manager appliance in both clusters
  • Go to “https://<ip of vSphere Replication appliance>:5480” in first cluster
    • username: root
    • password: what ever you specified!
  • Click on “Configuration Page” link
  • Specify Password of vCenter Server in the Password field
  • Click “Apply Network Settings”
  • Click “Save and Restart Service”
  • Accept the SSL Certificate
  • Repeat the above for the second cluster!
  • Now go to your vSphere H5 Client and wait until the vSphere Replicated tasks are completed
  • Log out of the vSphere H5 Client and log back in for both clusters
  • Now go to the first cluster / vCenter server
  • Now click on “Menu” and then “Site Recovery”
  • Click “open Site Recovery”
  • Click “New Site Pair”
  • Fill out the details of the second vCenter Server
  • Click Next and Connect if you get a security alert and are certain this is the correct vCenter instance
  • Select the correct listed vCenter instance and vSphere Replication appliance
  • Click Next and Finish, now you will see a task within vCenter that states “Connect vSphere Replication Sites”
  • Now you have vSphere Replication running and you can replicate VMs from one location to the other manually if and when desired.

[Read more…] about Install and Configure vSphere Replication with SRM 8.3 on vSphere 7

Creating a vSAN 7.0 Stretched Cluster

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A while ago I wrote this article and created this demo showing the creation of a vSAN Stretched Cluster. I bumped into the article/video today when I was looking for something and figured that it is time to recreate the vSAN Stretched Cluster demo. I recorded it today, using vSphere / vSAN 7, and just wanted to share it with you here. Hope you enjoy it.

vSAN 7.0 UI enhancements for vSphere Replication

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I have been playing around with vSphere / vSAN 7.0 the past week or so. Today I configured vSphere Replication between two vCenter Server instances with vSphere / vSAN 7.0. I wanted to check out the enhancements that were introduced in the UI. Although they are relatively small enhancements, I feel they will make your life as an administrator much easier. The problem people had with VMs which were replicated using vSphere Replication is the fact that the vSphere Client didn’t show much information about the objects. You could not see how much capacity was consumed, or even to what the object belonged to. vSphere 7.0 changes this! When you go to the vSAN section under Monitoring you can now in the “Virtual Objects” pane not only see the objects, you can also easily identify to which VM they belong and you can easily see the different “point in time” copies associated with the VM.

On top of that, the Capacity overview also shows you these details under “User Objects”. Interested in what it looks like? Just watch the demo below, it is just under 2 minutes, a nice quick to-the-point overview of what was introduced for vSphere Replication in vSAN 7.0