Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

u2

vSphere 8.0 U2 and vSAN 8.0 U2 just shipped, learn all about it here!

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vSphere 8.0 U2 and vSAN 8.0 U2 just shipped, and of course the Unexplored Territory Podcast has already covered this. If you want to learn all about it make sure to listen to the episode below. Or of course read the release notes (vCenter, ESXi, vSAN).

You can find the vSAN 8.0 U2 episode on Spotify (https://bit.ly/3QNjpFk), and Apple (https://bit.ly/3QPt7XL), as well as any other podcast app, or simply listed via the embedded player below!

You can find the vSphere 8.0 U2 episode on Spotify (https://bit.ly/3snOh5l), Apple (https://bit.ly/45lRK2Q), as well as any other podcast app, or simply listed via the embedded player below!

Deleting the vCLS VMs using Retreat Mode starting with vSphere 8.0 U2

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I posted about “retreat mode” and how to delete the vCLS VMs when needed a while back, including a quick demo. Back then you needed to configure an advanced setting for a cluster if you wanted to delete the VMs for whatever reason. (Usually for troubleshooting purposes people would do a delete/recreate.) Starting with vSphere 8.0 U2 you can now use the UI to enable retreat mode on a per cluster level. How do you do this? well fairly straight forward:

  • Click on the cluster you would want to delete the VMs for
  • Click on Configure
  • Click on “General” under “vSphere Cluster Services”
  • Click on “EDIT VCLS MODE”
  • Click on “Retreat Mode” and click “OK”

Now the VMs will be deleted, if you want to recreate the VMs, follow the same procedure, but change “Retreat Mode” to “System Managed”. I tested the process yesterday and created a quick demo for you:

vSAN File Services fails to create file share with error Failed to create the VDFS File System.

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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”.

vSAN Storage Rules policy capability allows to set dedupe per VM?

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There was a question posted on the VMware Community Forums, and as this is something I have been asked regularly, I figured I would do a quick blog post about it. Although I have covered this before, it doesn’t hurt to repeat, as it appears to be somewhat confusing for people. When you create a VM Storage Policy, starting with vSAN 7.0 U2 you have the ability to specify if a VM needs to be Encrypted, have Dedupe and Compression enabled, have Compression-Only enabled, and/or needs to be stored on all-flash vSAN or Hybrid. Never noticed it? Look at the screenshot below.

In the screenshot, you see that you have the ability to specify which data service needs to be enabled. I guess this is where the confusion comes into play, as this functionality is not about enabling the data service for the VM to which you assign the policy. This is about which data service needs to be enabled on the datastore to which the VM can be provisioned. Huh, what? Okay, let’s explain.

If you are using vSAN as your storage platform, and you are sharing vSAN Datastores between clusters leveraging the HCI Mesh feature, then you could find yourself in a situation where some clusters are hybrid and some are all-flash. Some may have data services enabled like Encryption or Deduplication, some may not. In that scenario you want to be able to specify which features need to be enabled for the datastore the VM is provisioned to. So what this “storage rules” feature does is that it ensure that the datastore which is shown as “compatible” actually has the specified capabilities enabled! In other words, if you tick “data-at-rest encryption” in a policy and assign the policy to a VM, then only the datastores which have “data-at-rest encryption” enabled will be shown as compatible with your VM!

So again, “storage rules” apply to the data services that should be enabled on the vSAN Datastore, and do not enable data services on a per VM/VMDK basis.

<Update for vSAN 8.0 ESA>

With vSAN 8.0 ESA the above has changed. With vSAN 8.0 ESA you can set compression per VM, and you actually do that using the policy storage rules. I discussed this in this blog post.

Which vSAN Maintenance Mode option was used on a host?

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Last week there was a question on VMTN around maintenance mode, this customer wanted to find out which vSAN Maintenance Mode option was used while the host was placed in maintenance mode. The person who placed the host into maintenance wasn’t around, and I guess the customer wanted to know if data was moved from the host or not. They looked at the events and tasks, but unfortunately it wasn’t obvious from that vCenter section, next up were the logs. I also looked at the logs, and you would expect this info to be stored in hostd.log, but it wasn’t, so where is it? Well it actually is a configuration item, and you can dig it up here:

Pre ESXi 7.0 the info is stored in the “esx.conf” file, just grep for “hostDecommission”. Let me show you:

$ grep "/vsan/hostDecommission" /etc/vmware/esx.conf
/vsan/hostDecommissionVersion = "10"
/vsan/hostDecommissionState = "decom-state-decommissioned"
/vsan/hostDecommissionMode = "decom-mode-ensure-object-accessibility"

If the ESX is at 7.0 or later, just run the below config store command:

$ configstorecli config current get -c vsan -g system -k host_state
{
   "decom_mode": "ENSUREOBJECT_ACCESSIBILITY",
   "decom_state": "DECOMMISSIONED",
   "decom_version": 0
}

I hope that helps others who have a similar question!