VxRAIL on blogs.hareeshkg.com

vSAN 7.0U2 Performance-Whats New?

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 18:42:36 +0000

In this blog I will go over some of the key benefits with vSAN 7.0U2. I got my hands on a 4 node VxRail Cluster, where I was able to run a few HCIBench tests to compare performance difference between vSAN 7.0 U1 and vSAN 7.0U2. I won’t be able to write a performance comparison between 6.7.x / 7.0x and vSAN 7.0 U1 as there is a white paper published by Dell-EMC for vSAN 7.0U1 see VxRAIL-7.0.100-Performance-White-Paper.

How to upgrade to VxRail™ 7.0

Sun, 03 May 2020 16:50:52 +0000

In this blog you will see how we upgrade your VxRail

cluster to version 7.x. The pre-requisites and approach to upgrade to VxRAIL 7..x has quite few changes when compared to previous versions/releases.

Note: VxRail upgrades is usually done through VxRail support over a remote session or thru onsite VxRail Systems Engineer from DELL-EMC or through Dell-EMC partners. Ensure to read thru the DELL-EMC Solve procedure before attempting an upgrade or contact DELL-EMC support for assistance.

Why does vSAN disks get unmounted ?

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 07:42:36 +0000

vSAN will declare the disks as permanently unavailable , dead or unmounted for multiple reasons . You will have further investigate on the logs to find out the case for such unmounts . Here is a small guide which should enable you to isolating the problem .

It is always good to start looking into the vmkernel.log and vobd.log for the drive (naa.ID) to see the reason for the Disk unmount or DG umounts . The vCenter ⇒ Cluster ⇒ Configure (Manage in 6.2) ⇒ Disk Management View should indicate the Disk or DG which is unhealthy failed or unmounted .

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 .

Why and How to Deploy vSAN HCI Bench for vSAN?

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 09:03:23 +0000

After you setup a new vSAN/VxRAIL/VxRACK HCI deployment , you will definitely need to benchmark your cluster before moving it to production . Here is your small guide to “vSAN Performance Benchmark” using a famous useful tool called HCI Bench which is freely available on VMware Labs website .

You may be wondering what is the recommended and correct way to test the performance and review performance on a hyper-converged infrastructure .

If you have not gone thru my previous posts about understanding-vm-storage-policies and understanding-vsan-component-placement-sizing I highly encourage you to go thru that topic which will give you a deep insight on how components are created , placed and how we can view them .

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

VxRAIL Hosts going Non-responsive due to a plugin conflict

Mon, 18 Dec 2017 07:48:55 +0000

“VxRAIL Hosts going Non-responsive” symptoms are seen because of many reason , here we are going to discuss about one such issues seen which is very common lately .

The hosts Generally go non-responsive is because the hostd service on the ESXi hosts is non-responsive . The fastest way to fiund is through the iDRAC / KVM console to the hosts directly and press ALT+F12(Function Key 12) or F11 (Function Key 12)on your keyboard to see live vmkernel logging and you will see messages relating to the hostd service going non-responsive , further if SSH is available to the hosts we should be able to check the logs live .