VSAN-General on blogs.hareeshkg.com

What is vSAN Support Insight – CEIP?

Sat, 15 Sep 2018 11:31:44 +0000

vSAN Support Insight was introduced last year with the release of vSAN 6.6.1 ( VC/ESXi 6.5 U1 Patch 02 and above) . It is a phone home system leveraging the existing vCenter Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). Health, performance, and configuration information for VMware Support and engineering. Once enabled and verified, log information is pushed back to VMware’s Analytics Cloud on a regular cadence approximately every hour . No actual customer data is phoned home and user enter able or identifiable data (Hostnames, VM names, subnets, IP addresses, Mac addresses) are obfuscated . In this blog you will further see what data is seen by VMware support vs your Webclient View .

How to Configure vSAN Encryption?

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 17:16:11 +0000

I have been asked about vSAN encryption a lot these days as the security requirement and standards are exponentially increasing in the IT industry . Data encryption is a key factor to make sure mission critical data are not stolen . Here is a quick and simple guide to configure vSAN-encryption with a Hy-Trust appliance and best practices to deploy and configure encryption cluster with High-Availability .

Introduction to vSAN Encryption

Here is a pictorial representation of vSAN Encryption work flow which explains different hand shakes which are going to be executed until we finally encrypt the physical disks which are going to be used with vSAN , you may also refer to VMware-official-page for additional information .

Unable to manage vSAN on Webclient

Wed, 09 May 2018 16:23:13 +0000

At many times we may see issues with webclient reporting a 120 second time out and we are unable to manage vSAN from the configure (Cluster ⇒ Configure ⇒ vSAN ) and monitor (Cluster ⇒ Monitor⇒ vSAN ) for vSAN . However from the SSH the cluster is health with no issues . This is generally indication of problems with the vSAN health services and some times it is the storage provider service which runs at the vcenter level which is responsible to poll and display information on the web-client for vSAN-UI area .

vSAN iSCSI targets configuration deep dive

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 16:16:34 +0000

I have been asked about vSAN iSCSI target configuration and how the objects looks within vSAN ? Here is a small guide that gets you going with vSAN iSCSI configuration and how you get to see the actual luns within vSAN as vSAN objects .

The iSCSI lun creation and presentation is very simple , I have put together screenshots from my lab to create and export vSAN iSCSI luns to a Windows server 2012 box . Please follow the series of screenshots to create and setup iSCSI exports from vSAN to external physical machines . In the below example we do not see creation of initiator group , usually initiator groups are created to allow a set of Luns to a certain set of IQN to which the luns must be visible .

Understanding VM-Storage-Policies

Wed, 27 Dec 2017 05:34:22 +0000

I highly encourage everyone to go thru the Blog/Article about “understanding-vsan-objects-and-component” which explains how components are created based on the policy that you create . So that you understand the fundamentals of Objects and components which will help you “Understanding VM-Storage-Policies” .

Lets pick up a single virtual machines try and apply different policy , look at the object placement view and number of components created their placement , object reservation and number of child components created . Look at this from Webclient / RVC and from ESXi perspective and understand the data/outputs . We really need to know the RVC method and ESXCLI method because during an outage we might have lost vcenter , to look at status of the objects esxcli commands will be still helpful .

Correlating VXRAIL release with VMware Build Numbers

Thu, 21 Dec 2017 07:00:14 +0000

Hello all here is a table to compare the versions of different VxRAIL manager with VCenter server / vSAN and ESXI build . If you were planning to upgrade your vcenter /ESXI or vSAN release to address any known problems , you will have to upgrade this from the VxRAIL manager and not directly thru VC/ESXi . Please engage your EMC support to assist you with the upgrade process .

Here is a table of matching VxRAIL and VMware release . This information is now available thru VMware official KB : [https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52075

Understanding vsan Objects and Components

Mon, 18 Dec 2017 12:02:57 +0000

To understand vSAN component placement and sizing , we should be proficient in creating storage policy and understand the parameters you choose while creating a storage policy . I recommend you to read the vm-storage-policy guide before proceeding .

Please note the following Section “Understanding Component Placements” will not apply to vSAN Clusters running version 7 U1, as there are some changes for placements, which considers new space efficiency feature for slack-space. Please read the new blog for “Component-Placement-7U1 and above”.

Things to know for vSAN management

Sat, 16 Dec 2017 20:35:51 +0000

At many times we may wonder while managing multiple vSAN clusters in a production environment , what are my”Things to know for vSAN management” you may ask yourself ?,a Complete guide for your every day tasks while managing vSAN clusters and things to know which can cause potential disaster without taking precautions

Virtual machine storage policy compliance

You might have already seen all my other previous hosts and by now you would have realized that virtual machine storage policy is everything when it comes to data protection . We need to always make sure all the important virtual machines are compliant with their storage policies at all times and if there were any VMs running FTT-0 which we may still need redundancy , change the policy to FTT-1 (fault to tolerate). Please see How-to-create-VM-policy-vSAN .

How to Silence Warnings on vSAN health Plugin

Sat, 30 Sep 2017 14:51:18 +0000

How to silence warnings on vSAN health Plugin? There are many situations that you may be aware of a particular warning which is not very critical and which is something you are already aware of , however you would like to have the warning silenced or disabled and would like to see the health check come clean every-time time you log in the web-client . There may be known warnings on the vSAN health check plugin you may see in a vSAN cluster , Ex : vMotion: MTU check (ping with large packet size) , vSAN Build Recommendation Engine Health , Component metadata health, Customer experience improvement program (CEIP) and vSAN HCL DB Auto Update ..etc.

How to Login into RVC?

Sat, 30 Sep 2017 13:44:50 +0000

How to Login into RVC? , I have been asked this question multiple times and there is no default KB and direct link explaining the steps to login to RVC for vCenter servers . This article explains steps to login into RVC for both vcenter Server Appliance and Windows based vcenter server .

How to log into RVC on a VCSA (appliance)

Example :

How to perform vSAN cluster maintenance activities

Thu, 10 Aug 2017 15:34:41 +0000

How to perform vSAN cluster maintenance activities? You may be wondering what should be the Steps to reboot vSAN hosts and pre-checks before attempting a host reboot which is participating in a vSAN cluster , here is your guide to make sure your are not affecting your production in the process of a vSAN node upgrade . It is highly recommended to have a BACKUP in place for your VMs before you attempt any maintenance activity on a production cluster .

Upgrade to vSAN 6.6

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 15:46:49 +0000

How to Upgrade to vSAN 6.6 ? How to Upgrade vSAN cluster through Update manager? There is significant improvement when it comes to performance and the way things are handled in vSAN 6.6 , you are allowed to perform upgrades for the hosts using Update Manager available on the latest vCenter server 6.5 update 1 as VUM is now aware of vSAN enabled cluster . For all environments which are 6.0 U3 for both Vcenter server and ESXi and you are looking forward to leverage all features of VSAN 6.6 , you may now upgrade the setup to 6.5 U1 for both vCenter server and hosts . There are more information that you need to know about vSAN-6.6 I encourage you to see vsan6.6-official page , also see vSAN6.6-Performance Improvements .

How to Upgrade vSAN CLuster with Best practices

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 14:37:02 +0000

Here is your simple “How to Upgrade vSAN with best practice guide ?” . I have been asked by a lot of people recently regarding vSAN upgrades sequence , questions will generally be like ,what are my threats? , what are the prerequisites ? , Should I perform upgrades on all hosts together or one node after another ? what are my checks before I proceed to upgrade vSAN hosts? what are the dependencies before I start upgrading my hosts .However you may ask why should I upgrade my hosts / VCenter servers ? The answer to that is very simple , based on certain known issues seen on each version or builds the fixes are provided in the next patches /updates or version releases . It is recommended to get the hosts to latest patches available at the current version if not going forward with the next version release .

vSAN deployment and administrator’s Guide

Sun, 11 Jun 2017 08:25:54 +0000

Learn everything about vsan setup and administration , to know about most of things around vSAN you will need to understand very few basic things/checks on your environment which will help you monitor your environment better . The general queries that comes to everyone’s mind which I can think of are as below . For more information regarding vSAN administration and best practices also refer VMware vSAN Admin Guides which are available here

Download vmem file from a vSAN datastore

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 18:58:12 +0000

I recently came across a customer who was trying to download .vmem from the vSAN datastore, so that the memory dump can be shared with the Guest OS vendor like Microsoft for core dump analysis . Since vSAN datastore is an object store file system , the OSFS namespace will only contain the pointer file of about 118 bytes which points to the associated object within vSAN datastore similar to all the VMDK files and v-swap file .