VSAN-ESA on blogs.hareeshkg.com

Native vSAN Trace Object

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 18:11:08 +0000

vSANTraces are generally used to troubleshoot and debug critical performance issues in vSAN(OSA and ESA) and also in some cases they are used to troubleshoot vSAN data-path related problems such as Stuck-IO, Congestion, slow/no de-stage etcetera. vSANTraces are not require to troubleshoot/debug all kinds of issues however is required for certain cases.

In any vSAN enabled host, you might have noticed that the default location/path where the traces are collected is “/vsantraces”. Depending on the requirement, users may however change the path for vSANTraces to external Storage or a local datastore and change the default settings of “Number Of Files To Rotate:” and “Maximum Trace File Size:” for vSANTraces using esxcli commands. Having said that VMware doesnt recommend/allow customers to set the path for vSANTraces to vSAN-Datastore directly because it will impact performance of the virtual machines running on vSANDatastore as vsanTraces are write heavy (every subsystem of vSAN data-path writes to traces for bunch IO) which helps engineering to debug issues.

vSAN-ESA SPBM and Compoment placements

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:48:49 +0000

Introduction

vSAN-ESA has introduced this concept of Storage Pools where all the disks in a given storage-pool contributes towards total capacity available for consumption. This initial release of vSAN ESA supports compression and encryption however doesn’t support Deduplication. vSAN ESA also introduced this concept of a log structured file System a.k.a LFS which I had discussed about briefly in my previous blog post, see My-take-on-ESA.

When creating objects on vSAN-ESA datastore, the initial allocated space for each object by default is 3X the size of the object +** 2% of the Object Size**.

vSAN ESA – Log Structured File System

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 12:51:40 +0000

I have already briefly talked about vSAN-ESA’s Log Structured File System(LFS) in my previous blog, it advised to go over it once before you continue reading here.

This blog talks about the overview and architecture of LFS and how erasure coding is benefited when LFS was introduced into vSAN ESA architecture.

How LFS works?

LFS in vSAN-ESA is responsible to handle all the incoming I/Os(Reads and Write) and acknowledge as fast as possible to the guest.

My take on vSAN-ESA

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 09:55:19 +0000

vSAN-8 launched with a brand new storage architecture for vSAN called VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture or ESA along side with a few enhancements to vSAN-OSA which is the Original Storage Architecture.

Users are given an option at the beginning of vSAN Cluster setup with vSphere-8 to choose either of the architecture, in this blog I explain what are the key features and enhancements of vSAN ESA and how it compares to OSA.