Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vsan file service

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”.

Cleaning up old vSAN File Services OVF files on vCenter Server

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There was a question last week about the vSAN File Services OVF Files, the question was about the location where they were stored. I did some digging in the past, but I don’t think I ever shared this. The vSAN File Services OVF is stored on vCenter Server (VCSA) in a folder, for each version. The folder structure looks as show below, basically each version of an OVF has a directory with required OVF files.

root@vcsa-duncan [ ~ ]# ls -lha /storage/updatemgr/vsan/fileService/

total 24K

vsan-health users 4.0K Sep 16 16:09 .

vsan-health root  4.0K Nov 11  2020 ..

vsan-health users 4.0K Nov 11  2020 ovf-7.0.1.1000

vsan-health users 4.0K Mar 12  2021 ovf-7.0.2.1000-17692909

vsan-health users 4.0K Nov 24  2021 ovf-7.0.3.1000-18502520

vsan-health users 4.0K Sep 16 16:09 ovf-7.0.3.1000-20036589

root@vcsa-duncan [ ~ ]# ls -lha /storage/updatemgr/vsan/fileService/ovf-7.0.1.1000/

total 1.2G

vsan-health users 4.0K Nov 11  2020 .

vsan-health users 4.0K Sep 16 16:09 ..

vsan-health users 179M Nov 11  2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758-cloud-components.vmdk

vsan-health users 5.9M Nov 11  2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758-log.vmdk

vsan-health users  573 Nov 11  2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758_OVF10.mf

vsan-health users  60K Nov 11  2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758_OVF10.ovf

vsan-health users 998M Nov 11  2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758-system.vmdk

I’ve asked the engineering team, and yes, you can simply delete obsolete versions if you need the disk capacity.

vSAN File Services IPs not reachable when using NSX-T?

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I’ve had this question a few times, if you enable vSAN File Services and you use NSX-T and it’s not possible to reach the vSAN File Service IP addresses, what should you do? In 999 out of the 1000 cases, it typically is a matter of enabling Mac Learning on the Segment Profile for the segment being used by vSAN File Services. I stole the below screenshot from William, it shows you how to enable it.

You may wonder why this needs to be enabled, well basically because the vSAN File Services VM is not what you are directly communicating with. The IP Address and MAC address you communicate with is associated with the vSAN File Service protocol stack container. As a result, MAC Learning needs to be enabled. I described this already in my FAQ post, but as it comes up frequently I figured I would dedicate a post to it.

Sharing my vSAN 7.0 U1 webinar, watch it now!

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I recorded a webinar a while back. It was streamed last week, and I figured that as I have the recording here, I may as well share it with you. In this webinar I discuss many of the new features which were introduced as part of vSAN 7.0 U1, features like HCI Mesh, IO Insight, enhanced File Service capabilities, and much more. The session is about 40 minutes long, but of course, the great thing about youtube is that you can play it at a different speed. Hope you will enjoy it! Click on the video below, or simply follow this link to youtube. Make sure to like the video, and subscribe to my channel as well!

Inspecting vSAN File Services share objects

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Today I was looking at vSAN File Services a bit more and I had some challenges figuring out the details on the objects associated with a File Share. Somehow I had never noticed this, but fortunately, Cormac pointed it out. In the Virtual Objects section of the UI you have the ability to filter, and it now includes the option to filter for objects associated to File Shares and to Persistent Volumes for containers as well. If you click on the different categories in the top right you will only see those specific objects, which is what the screenshot below points out.

Something really simple, but useful to know. I created a quick youtube video going over it for those who prefer to see it “in action”. Note that at the end of the demo I also show how you can inspect the object using RVC, although it is not a tool I would recommend for most users, it is interesting to see that RVC does identify the object as “VDFS”.