Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

virtual san

Migrating from Hybrid to All-Flash VSAN

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I had this question twice last week and I went through the exercise in the lab so I figured I would share the experience. Migrating from Hybrid to All-Flash VSAN is pretty straight forward, and is pretty much an rolling migration. One thing I want to point out is that you need to do the full migration first before you enable any dataservices (dedupe/compression/raid-5/6). This is how you do it:

  1. Open the vSphere Web Client.
  2. Click the Hosts and Clusters tab.
  3. Select the cluster which you want to migrate to all-flash Virtual SAN.
  4. Click the Manage tab.
  5. Click Settings.
  6. Click Disk Management.
  7. Select the first Disk Group and click the Remove Disk Group icon
  8. Select Full data migration and click Yes
  9. Remove the physical HDDs from the host
  10. Add the new Flash devices to the host
  11. Ensure there are no partitions on the flash devices
  12. Ensure they are marked as flash devices
  13. Now create a new Disk Group on this host by clicking the “Create a new disk group” button
  14. Select the Caching Device
  15. Select the Capacity Devices
  16. Click OK

Repeat above steps for each host in the cluster. When finished upgrading all hosts in your cluster you can now enable your dataservices and/or change policies.

Want to hear all about VSAN 6.2? Watch the #SFD9 recordings!

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Last week my colleagues had the pleasure to present at Storage Field Day 9 (SFD9). The topic was Virtual SAN, and more specifically what we released with 6.2 and how we are doing from a business point of view / where we stand in the industry. Great explanation by the team on all the different aspects of this release, and even around some of the basic constructs like disk groups etc. One thing that stood out to me, was the explanation of Yanbing around the customer count, I’ve seen one of our competitors screaming shelfware every time they get the chance, which I guess is a great validation to begin with because why worry about something that isn’t a problem to begin with, but still I would like to share this quote:

VSAN has well over 3000 customers. So how did we count these 3000 customers. VSAN’s business is largely build on a transaction based business. Three quarters (75%) of the customers come from the transaction deals. Another quarter (25%) comes from ELA (enterprise license agreements), and most of those customers go through a Proof of Concept with VSAN and they have decided to make that choice. We also have another customer segment which is through the Horizon / VDI use case where we track actual deployments in those use cases.

The intro is by Yanbing Li, General Manager of the Storage and Availability business unit at VMware. Followed by the basics, what’s new and deeper dives by Christos Karamanolis, CTO Storage and Availability at VMware. And last a short demo to show the operational simplicity by Rawlinson Rivera, Principal Architect Storage and Availability at VMware. I created a simple playlist, if you want to skip videos you can do so by clicking those lines top left and select the one you want to view. Thanks Stephen Foskett for capturing and sharing these sessions, awesome job once again!

VSAN Health checks disabled after upgrade to vCenter 6.0 U2

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Yesterday at the Dutch VMUG I was talking to my friend @GabVirtualWorld. Gabe mentioned that he had just upgraded his vCenter Server to 6.0 U2 in his VSAN environment, but hadn’t upgraded the hosts yet. Funny enough later someone else mentioned the same scenario and both of them noticed that the VSAN Health Checks were disabled after upgrading vCenter Server. Below a screenshot of the issue Gabe saw in his environment. (Thanks Gabe)

vsan health checks disabled

So does that mean there is no backwards compatibility for the Healthcheck, well yes and no. In this release we made our APIs public, William Lam wrote a couple of great articles on this, and in order to deliver a high quality SDK backwards compatibility had to be broken with this release. So if you received the “health checks disabled” message after upgrading to vCenter Server 6.0 U2, you can simply solve this by also upgrading the hosts to ESXi 6.0 U2. I hope this helps.

** Update March 23rd **

Please note that ESXi 6.0 Update 2 is also a requirement in order to enable the “Performance Service” which was newly introduced in Virtual SAN 6.2. Although the Performance Service capability is exposed in vCenter Server 6.0 Update 2, without ESXi 6.0 U2 you will not be able to enable it. When trying to enable it on any version of ESXi lower than 6.0 U2 the following error will be thrown:

Task Details:

Status: General Virtual SAN error.
Start Time: Mar 23, 2016 10:55:35 AM
Completed Time: Mar 23, 2016 10:55:38 AM
State: Error

Error Stack: The performance service on host is not accessible. The host may be unreachable, or the host version may not be supported

This is what the error looks like in the UI:

Here you go, VSAN 6.2 GA!

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We’ve been talking about if for a while now, but last night the moment finally arrived… VSAN 6.2 aka vSphere 6.0 Update 2 was released. I am not going to go in to any level of depth here, as I have written many posts on the subject of VSAN 6.2 already, and so has my friend Cormac, the best start is probably this blog though. You can read those if you want to get the nitty gritty details, or nerd knobs as apparently some like to call it. (I prefer to call it a healthy level of curiosity, but that is a different discussion.) Here is what is in 6.2:

  • Deduplication and Compression
  • RAID-5/6 (Erasure Coding)
  • Sparse Swap Files
  • Checksum / disk scrubbing
  • Quality of Service / Limits
  • In mem read caching
  • Integrated Performance Metrics
  • Enhanced Health Service

Now that is not it, there is also some new stuff in vSphere 6.0 Update 2, one which I feel is very welcome and that is the Host Client! A full HTML5 based client which comes as part of your ESXi host, very useful if you ask me! Also two-factor authentication was added for the Web Client, several enhancements to the vSphere APIs for IO Filtering and support for different databases for vCenter etc.

Okay, lets stop blabbing, start your download engines, find your bits here:

Essential Virtual SAN (6.2) available for pre-order

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Just noticed that Essential Virtual SAN (based on 6.2) the second edition is available on Amazon for pre-ordering. If you are interested, make sure to put your order in and get it the day it is made available. For now the publication date is set to the 13th of June, hopefully we can shorten it a bit… We will do our best.

Fully updated for the newest versions of VMware Virtual SAN, this guide show how to scale VMware’s fully distributed storage architecture to meet any enterprise storage requirement. World-class Virtual SAN experts Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping thoroughly explain how Virtual SAN integrates into vSphere 6.x and enables the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). You’ll learn how to take full advantage of Virtual SAN, and get up-to-the-minute insider guidance for architecture, implementation, and management.

If you want to order it at a local book store, here are the ISBN details:

  • ISBN-13: 978-0134511665
  • ISBN-10: 0134511662

Also expect an update on when the Kindle version can be expected. Thanks!