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by Duncan Epping

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VMware

Disk format change going from 6.x to vSAN 6.6?

Duncan Epping · Apr 20, 2017 ·

Internally I received a comment around the upgrade to 6.6 and the disk format version change. When you upgrade to 6.6 also the version of  disk changes, it goes to version 5. In the past with these on-disk format changes a data move was needed and the whole disk group would be reformat. When going from vSAN 6.2 (vSphere 6.0 U2 that is!) to vSAN 6.6 there is no data move needed. The update is simply a metadata update, and on the average cluster will take less than 20 minutes.

When introducing encryption in to the environment you will need to evac data though as this will be a reformat of the disk. Reason for it being is that the disk will need to be encrypted and so will the data. This doesn’t mean however that if you want to “rekey” your environment a full format and data move is needed, vSAN Encryption has the ability to do a so called “shallow rekey” which means that the Key Encryption Key (KEK) will be replaced (see animated gif below), but not the Data Encryption Key (DEK). It is possible to do a deep rekey, but this will mean a full reformat and data evac of all disk groups. I hope that clears things up.

vSAN 6.6 available now

Duncan Epping · Apr 18, 2017 ·

vSAN 6.6 is available now. Check the release notes before you upgrade! Also note that for vSAN users currently on 6.0 Update 3 – upgrade to vSAN 6.6 is not yet supported. If you like to learn more about vSAN 6.6 check the following material:

  • vSAN Encryption demo
  • vSAN 6.6 demo
  • vSAN 6.6 What’s new blog

Note that vSAN 6.6 comes as a patch release, download the bits here from the vSAN 6.6 landing page:

  • vCenter Server 6.5.0d
  • ESXi 6.5.0d
  • vSAN 6.6 Release Notes

 

VMware vSAN 6.6 demo: vSAN Encryption

Duncan Epping · Apr 13, 2017 ·

Yesterday I posted a quick video overview of a couple new features that are part of vSAN 6.6. (haven’t seen it, go watch that one first!) I mentioned in that demo that I would potentially do one on Encryption. As I had over a dozen people asking already I figured I would throw a demo together today. Build an environment in our development cloud and below is the result. In the demo we will show how to configure vSAN Encryption and more. Oh, 1080p version can be found here. Enjoy.

VMware vSAN 6.6 demo

Duncan Epping · Apr 12, 2017 ·

I was playing around with a vSAN 6.6 environment yesterday and I figured I would record a quick demo of some of the new functionality introduced. Took me a bit longer than expected, but here it is. I hope you will find it useful, a 1080p version can be viewed on youtube.

VM showing that HA failure response is disabled in 6.5?

Duncan Epping · Apr 11, 2017 ·

I had a customer asking me today why on each VM it was showing that all HA responses are disabled. This customer is running vSphere 6.5 and below you can see what the UI showed. Note that it still says the VM is Protected, yet none of the protection mechanisms appeared to be enabled

I asked them to show me a screenshot of their HA configuration, and the HA configuration actually had several of these response mechanisms enabled. I checked my vSphere 6.5 lab and it seems I have the same problem and there’s a UI issue on the VM level details for vSphere HA in vSphere 6.5. I verified with engineering, and this is indeed a known issue which has been identified and is fixed in vCenter Server 6.5.0b! KB Article on the topic can be found here, and in the release notes for 6.5.0b it is mentioned that it is fixed.

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About the Author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist and Distinguished Engineering Architect at Broadcom. Besides writing on Yellow-Bricks, Duncan is the co-author of the vSAN Deep Dive and the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book series. Duncan is also the host of the Unexplored Territory Podcast.

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