Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

virtual san

#STO7904 VSAN Management Current and Futures by @cdickmann

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Christian Dickmann (VSAN Development Architect) talking about VSAN Management futures in this session, first of all a big fat disclaimer, all of these features may or may not ever make it in to a release and no promises of timelines were made. This session all revolved around VSAN’s mission: Providing Radically Simple HCI with Choice. Keep that in mind when reading the rest of article. Also, this session literally just finished a second ago, I wanted to publish it asap so if there are any typos, my apologies.

First Christian went over the current VSAN Management Experience, discussing the creation of a VSAN Cluster, health monitoring and performance monitoring. VSAN is already dead simple from a storage point of view, but there is room for improvement from an operational point of view, and mostly in the vSphere space. Install / Update / Upgrades of drivers, firmware, ESXi, vCenter etc.

1st demo: HCI Installer

In this demo a deployment of the vCenter Server Appliance is shown. We connect to an ESXi server fist. Then you provide all the normal vCenter Server details like password. Where do you want to deploy the appliance? How about on VSAN? Well you can actually create the VSAN Datastore during the deployment of the VCSA. You specify VSAN details and go ahead. During the install/configuration process VSAN will simply be configured using a single host cluster. When vCenter is installed and configured you simply add the rest of the hosts to the cluster. Very cool if you ask me!

2nd demo: Simple VMkernel interface creation

In this demo the creation of VMkernel interfaces is shown. Creation of the interfaces is dead simple as you can simply specify the IP ranges and it does this for every host using the specified details. Literally 4 hosts and interfaces were creates in seconds.

3rd demo: Firmware Upgrade

In this demo in the VSAN Healthcheck it is shown that the firmware of the disk controller is out of date. When you say update, vendor specific tools are downloaded and installed first. When this is completed you can remediate your cluster and install drivers and firmware for all nodes in your cluster, all done through the UI (webclient) and literally in minutes in a rolling fashion. I wish I had this when I had to upgrade my lab in the past.

4th demo: VUM Integration

80% of vSphere customers use VUM so integrating VSAN upgrades and updates with VUM makes a lot of sense. During the upgrade process VUM will validate which version of vSphere/VSAN is supported for your environment. If for whatever reason the latest version is not supported for your configuration it will make a recommendation to use a different version. When you remediate VSAN provides the image needed and there is no need even to create baselines etc. All of this manual work is done by VSAN for you. Upgrades literally become 1 or 2 clicks, and all risks are mitigated by validation of hardware/software against the compatibility matrix.

5th demo: Automation

In this demo Christian showed how to automate the deployment of 10 ROBO clusters end to end using PowerCLI. One by one all the different locations are being created. Every single aspect is fully automated, including even the deployment of the witness appliance. The second demo was the upgrade of the VSAN on-disk format using python. In a fully automated fashion all clusters are upgraded in a rolling fashing. No magic here, all using public APIs.

6th demo: VSAN Analytics

Apparently with the 6.2 Christian found out that Admin’s don’t read all KB articles VMware releases, based on the issue experienced with a disk controller he decided to solve this problem. Can we pro-actively inform you about this problem? Yes we can, using a “cloud connected” VSAN Healthcheck we know what you are using and we can inform you about KBs and potential issues and recommendations that may apply to you. And that is what was shown in this demo, a known issue is bubbled up through the healthcheck and the KB details are provided. Mitigating is simply a matter of applying the recommendation. This is still a manual step, and probably will stay as Christian emphasized as you as the administrator need to have control and should make the decision whether you want to apply the steps/patches or not.

Concluding, in literally 40 minutes Christian showed how the VSAN team is planning on simplifying your life. Not just from a storage perspective, but for your complete vSphere infrastructure. I am hoping I can share the demos at some point in the future as they are worth watching. Thanks Christian for sharing, great job!

VSAN Healthcheck: Read Cache Reservations test failed

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** Please note: this has been solved in vSAN/vSphere 6.5GA and 6.0 p04 **

I’ve seen this popping up a bunch of times now, and it seems that the problem and solution is not easy to find for people so I thought I would give it a try as well. When running VSAN all-flash and Horizon View it can happen that you see a failed test for Read Cache Reservations in the VSAN Healthcheck. The reason for this failed test is simple: you are using read cache reservations but All-Flash has no read cache. So this is why the read cache reservations test failed. You can see the error below.

The solution is even easier, you change the policy that you are using on those objects. Change the policy to state 0% read cache and apply this policy to all objects! When applied you click “retest” on the Healthcheck and the error should go away. If you want to know more about Horizon View and policies make sure to read Cormac’s post here. There is also a KB on this topic, which can be found here.

Another major milestone, 5000 customers reached for VSAN!

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Yes, new quarterly results are out, and this is crazy, Yanbing (SVP/GM for Storage & Availability BU) dropped the news on twitter last night:

Yes that is correct, VSAN customer count grew with 1500 in just 1 quarter and the license bookings also grew > 200% Y0Y. Crazy numbers if you ask me, and some serious traction. Considering how well VxRail is doing I can only see this ramping up faster even. Just some quotes from last nights earnings call, you can find a transcript here and audio here if you are interested.

Pat Gelsinger:
Our hyper-converged license bookings, including VSAN and VxRail software, grew over 200% year-over-year. The new VxRail appliance we jointly developed with EMC was launched earlier this year and has enjoyed an impressive start, benefiting also from Dell’s decision to resell VxRail.

The rock stars of Q2 were NSX and VSAN and they were just fabulous

Yes, clearly the VxRail and the momentum that it is seeing was a piece of that. But a lot of the customer count was non-VxRail. So this product has now hit a point of inflection, as you suggest, that really was thrilling. And if I would call out one product in Q2 that just blew their numbers away, VSAN is it, and it was the rockstar of Q2 above all others. And what we’re seeing is that the product maturity, the channel momentum, I commented on the transactional channel before, and that really is well fit to VSAN. But also some of the enterprise use cases have clearly seen momentum, as well. And then we add to that the incremental benefits of VxRail that we jointly developed with EMC and Dell now reselling that VxRail product. It was also geographically balanced, as well. We saw VSAN growing across all of the geos, large customers, major wins, in healthcare, also mid market wins across different geos. So really, really excited about the VxRail, as well as the overall hyper-converged category for us and VSAN, the rockstar of Q2.

You know what, I will give away 5 “Essential Virtual SAN” books to 5 random people who leave a comment (and retweet / share this post on linkedin) to celebrate this great achievement. Please leave comment with your real name and correct email address so I can reply for your home address! I email winners Wednesday 19th of July end of day. [UPDATE: Winners have received an email from me, or will within the next 10 minutes]

Essential Virtual SAN second edition paper copy available now!

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As of today Essential Virtual SAN second edition paper copy is available on Amazon! If you are interested, pick it up today, note that there is also a Kindle version out there if you prefer that!

VMware’s Virtual SAN has rapidly proven itself in environments ranging from hospitals to oil rigs to e-commerce platforms. Along the way, it has matured to offer unsurpassed features for data integrity, availability, and space efficiency. Virtual SAN 6.x makes all-flash storage practical for even more use cases, while radically simplifying IT operations and supporting the transition to hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI). Now, the authors of Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) have thoroughly updated their definitive guide to this transformative technology. Writing for vSphere administrators, architects, and consultants, Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping explain what Virtual SAN is, how it has evolved, what it now offers, and how to gain maximum value from it.

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

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

Virtually Speaking Podcast: Rubrik and Virtual SAN

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As John Nicholson was on a holiday I got to co-host the Virtually Speaking Podcast together with Pete Flecha. As a guest we had Chris Wahl and we spoke about many different things, but the key theme was Rubrik and the paper Chris and Cormac wrote that talks about Rubrik backing up VMs that sit on top of VSAN. I think it was a fun conversation and just wanted to share it with you here. For those who haven’t listened to Virtually Speaking Podcast yet, make sure to subscribe and catch each episode as they are entertaining and educational at the same time if you ask me!