Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

esa

vSAN ReadyNode emulated configurations? What are those?

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Last week Pete Koehler dropped a bomb on us when he blogged about vSAN ReadyNode emulated configurations. Since then I had a few folks asking what this exactly is. It is fairly simple, some vendors have special SKUs for ReadyNodes, which doesn’t always make configuring a ReadyNode to the desired specifications based on the minimum requirements for vSAN ESA and the supported components. SAY WHAT?

Well just imagine you are a Dell shop and you want to use the R750. You simply check if the R750 is listed on the VCG, you list the minimum CPU spec and you go from there based on the minimum (and maximum) specifications for vSAN ESA and based on your workload profile. Just as an example, the minimum specifications for vSAN ESA are now as follows with the introduction of the vSAN AF-0 ReadyNode configuration:

  • Minimum of 16 cores Intel or AMD
    • For example: 2 x Intel Xeon® Gold 6334 3.6G, 8 cores
    • Or: 1 x AMD EPYC 9124 16C 200W 3.0GHz Processor
  • Minimum of 128GB memory
  • Minimum of 10GbE
  • Minimum of 2 NVMe Devices (as listed on vSAN VCG) and 3.2TB per host

Now that we know what those minimums are, I could simply go to the Dell website and spec a Dell R750 Server as desired. This server could have for instance:

  • 2 x Intel® Xeon Gold 6342 2.8G, 24 cores
  • 256GB memory
  • 25GbE networking
  • 6 x Dell Ent NVMe CM6 RI 3.84TB

Even though it is not on the list as a ReadyNode configuration, this configuration would be supported as all the components are certified, and the server itself is also certified as a vSAN ReadyNode platform, and we are following the guidelines as documented in the vSAN ESA RN KB.

vSAN ReadyNode emulated configurations? What are those?

I hope this helps those who are going through the process of procuring hardware for vSAN ESA.

MAXimizing vSAN’s potential with the Express Storage Architecture (vSAN Max)

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Last week at VMware Explore a few vSAN features and offerings were announced, one of them being vSAN Max! All week I have been having conversations with customers who were highly excited about the new solution. For those who did not read the announcements, or listened to the Unexplored Territory Podcast episode on the topic, let me go over what was announced and what vSAN Max is.

As most of you know, vSAN is a hyperconverged storage platform delivered via VMware’s flagship product vSphere. This means that if you have vSphere running, vSAN is literally two clicks away from being enabled. You will need local storage devices, and those local devices then will be formed into a shared datastore on top of which you can run your VMs. Although HCI solutions work for most customers, at certain levels of scale it may be preferred to have a disaggregated solution and share a dedicated storage platform with one or multiple vSphere clusters. This is what vSAN Max brings to the table.

MAXimizing vSAN’s potential with the Express Storage Architecture (vSAN Max)

Looking at the above diagram a few things stand out when it comes to vSAN Max. First of all, it says “Storage Only” and secondly it mentions “Supports high-density ESA ReadyNodes”. There are a few things to unwrap here. Firstly, vSAN Max is based on vSAN Express Storage Architecture, aka vSAN ESA. This means that it is a single tier of storage, based on NVMe flash devices. On top of that, it also means that all available data services will also be available on vSAN Max: Fault Domains, Stretched Clustering, vSAN File Services, iSCSI, Compression, Encryption etc. All of these are also included by default in the license by the way, it is just a single edition from a licensing point of view and it will include vSphere. In other words, vSphere + vSAN Enterprise by default, and licensed on capacity instead of CPU/Cores.

Secondly, it mentions “high-density”, vSAN Max starts at 200TB per host, and has a minimum of 6 hosts per cluster. This means that the starting capacity is 1.2 Petabytes for a vSAN Max cluster. The maximum number of hosts within a cluster is 32 at the time of writing (but 24 hosts being the recommended maximum), and it will support up to 8.6 Petabytes and around 3.4 million IOPS.

It also mentions ReadyNodes, and let me stress this, ReadyNodes! We still see a lot of customers picking random components for their vSAN cluster and then being surprised that Skyline Health reports the cluster is not supported. For vSAN Max there will be a separate set of vSAN ReadyNode configurations. These configurations will have for instance 100Gbps network cards, and as mentioned a minimum of 200TB per host.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the connecting clusters need to be running 100GbE, they can be even 1Gbps connected, that’s up to you and the requirements you have from a performance perspective. The 100GbE connections will be used for intra-cluster communications, so the switching architecture also needs to cater to this.

Knowing all of this, you may wonder what the use cases are for vSAN Max. As Pete Koehler mentioned, it can be used for anything, but is primarily targeted at those with high capacity requirements and who prefer a centralized model, but still want to manage their storage platform through vCenter Server and use all the bells and whistles that come with it (and with VROps for instance).

Hopefully, that provides some insights in terms of what to expect when vSAN Max goes “general availability” I will follow up with some short demos showing what it will look like, although that will probably be relatively boring as it will look very similar to vSAN ESA. In the meanwhile, there’s a bunch of material on the VMware website that you can check out.

Performance Management Object reduced availability on stretched cluster

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I created a new lab environment not too long ago and I ran into this situation where the Performance Management Object showed up as Reduced Availability with no Rebuild in vSAN Skyline Health. This happened in my case because I created a Stretched Cluster configuration after I had already formed a cluster, which means that the performance management object was randomly placed across hosts without taking those “failure domains” into account. I completely forgot about it until someone on VMTN reminded me about this. I had two options, fix the existing perf database, or simply disable/enable the perf service to it is recreated.

Performance Management Object reduced availability on stretched cluster

As I had no data stored in the database I figured disable/enable is the easiest route. I looked for the option in vSphere 8.0 U1 but could not find it, it seems that the UI option no longer exists for whatever reason. How do I now disable/enable the service? Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) to the rescue!

When you log in to RVC you can simply run the following commands on the cluster object you want to disable/enable the performance service for. Fairly straight forward, and fixed the issue within a minute or so:

vsan.perf.stats_object_delete <cluster>
vsan.perf.stats_object_create <cluster>

I also documented this in the vSAN 8.0 ESA Deep Dive Book by the way, you can buy a paper copy or ebook on Amazon.

New book: VMware vSAN 8.0 U1 Express Storage Architecture Deep Dive!

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We already gave some hints on twitter, and during an episode of the Unexplored Territory podcast, but here it finally is… The new book, the VMware vSAN 8.0 U1 Express Storage Architecture Deep Dive! It has been a year since we released the vSAN 7.0 U3 Deep Dive book, and with this brand new vSAN architecture being introduced in vSAN 8.0 we figured it was time to do a full overhaul of the book as well. Mind you, this new book purely deals with the Express Storage Architecture, aka vSAN ESA. This also means that some of the features which are not supported by ESA are not discussed in this book, for that you will need to buy the vSAN 7.0 U3 Deep Dive book, which covers OSA. Another big change is that we brought in a third author, we asked our good friend Pete Koehler to contribute to the book. Pete had done reviews of previous books, and considering the amount of material he produced for VMware Tech Marketing for vSAN (and ESA specifically) it made a lot of sense to bring him in!

VMware’s vSAN has rapidly proven itself in environments ranging from hospitals to oil rigs to e-commerce platforms and is the market leader in the hyperconverged space. Along the way, the world of IT has rapidly changed, not just from a software point of view, but also from a hardware perspective. With vSAN 8.0 VMware brought a new architecture to market called vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA). This architecture is highly optimized for today’s world of datacenter resources, be it CPU, memory, networking, or NVMe based flash storage.

The authors of the vSAN Deep Dive have thoroughly updated their definitive guide to this transformative technology. Writing for vSphere administrators, architects, and consultants, Cormac Hogan, Duncan Epping , and Pete Koehler explain what vSAN ESA is, why the architecture has changed, what it now offers, and how to gain maximum value from it. The book offers expert insight into preparation, installation, configuration, policies, provisioning, clusters, architecture, and more. You’ll also find practical guidance for using all data services, stretched clusters, two-node configurations, and cloud-native storage services.

Although we pressed publish on Tuesday, sometimes it takes a while before the book is available in all Amazon stores, but it should just trickle down in the upcoming 24-48 hours. The book is priced at 9.99 USD for the ebook and 29.99 USD for a paper copy, and is sold through Amazon only. Get it while it is hot, and we would appreciate it if you would use our referral links and leave a review when you finish it. Thanks for the support, and we hope you will enjoy it!

Of course, we also have the links to other major Amazon stores:

New book: VMware vSAN 8.0 U1 Express Storage Architecture Deep Dive!

vSAN 8.0 U1 ESA – Auto Policy Management

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One of the features that is introduced in vSAN 8.0 U1 for ESA is Auto-Policy Management. I personally love this feature, as it will help a lot of customers make the right decision in terms of what the default policy should be on their vSAN Datastore. Now, Pete Koehler wrote a very extensive blog post, and I don’t want to copy his work and simply rewrite it, so I suggest you read his blog for the full details on this brand new feature.

I do realize that some of you are just as lazy as I am, so here’s a short summary of what Auto-Policy Management is. Auto-Policy Management, when enabled, creates a new vSAN VM storage policy based on the capabilities enabled on your cluster and the size of your cluster. After creating the policy, the policy is also assigned to the datastore as the “default policy” so that any VMs which are provisioned without the selection of a policy get this optimized policy assigned. What influences the policy characteristics? Well: size of the cluster, stretched vs normal, host rebuild reserve enabled/disabled. All those factors will determine what kind of policy is created and associated with the datastore. If over time your cluster configuration changes, well then Skyline Health will inform you that changes are required to have an optimal policy again. Wonder what that looks like? Watch the demo below!