Posts on blogs.hareeshkg.com

What’s new with vSAN Data Protection (Snap Service Appliance)

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 07:41:33 +0000

In this blog I will be walking through the basics of vSAN Data Protection and its deployment.

What is vSAN Data Protection?

With introduction of vSAN ESA 8.0 U3 VMware by Broadcom also announced vSAN Data Protection. vSAN Data Protection is a feature which is deployed through an OVF appliance that gives you additional local protection to your virtual machines running on vSAN ESA clusters with the help of native snapshots which were already supported in vSAN ESA.

State of Disaggregated HCI (HCI Mesh)-vSAN 8 U1

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 19:02:28 +0000

Introduction

I have already talked about HCI Mesh (dHCI) when it was first launched with vSAN 7.0 U1 here, I would encourage you to read thru my previous blog for better understanding of this feature and its capabilities.

This feature was originally announced with vSAN OSA for 7.0 U1 with standard vSAN clusters where a server cluster could share its vSAN Datastore with 5 Client vSAN cluster and a Client Cluster could mount upto 5 remote vSAN Datastore.Compute-Only cluster was not supported in this initial release.

Large Write Buffer for vSAN 8 OSA Architecture

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 17:07:33 +0000

Introduction

In vSAN 8.0, VMware vSAN introduced support for “Large Write Buffer”(LWB) cache disk size of upto 1.6TB can be used with OSA architecture. Although larger disks were supported in the previous releases for use in caching tier for vSAN OSA disk groups, the write buffer usage was limited to 600GB even when cache disks are larger, using larger disks in the previous releases (7.0 U3 and lower) was only preferred to increase endurance life of Cache Disk SSD.

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.

vSAN Performance 7.0 U3 Whats new?

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 17:18:26 +0000

vSAN 7.0 U3 delivers improved performance with optimisations made to the data path when using RAID-5/6 erasure coding very similar to what was added to vSAN 7.0 U2 Performance enhancements , vSAN 7.0 U3 offers caching capability to the incoming writes who’s workloads are serialised and have sustained high outstanding IOPS, this caching capability for writes reduces significant amount of write amplification by enforcing full stripe writes always in the backend.This feature compliments the feature which was introduced with vSAN 7.0 U2 where the reads for large block sequential IOPS were cached.

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.

vSAN 7 U1 Component Placement

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 18:01:54 +0000

vSAN 7 U1 brought in significant changes to its method of creating components especially for objects which are larger than 255GB. This change was brought in adapt to minimum slack space requirements which is significantly lower than all previous versions of vSAN.

I highly encourage you to read thru blog articles “Understanding vsan Objects and Components” and “Understanding VM-Storage-Policies” as the basics about object/component placement are discussed in those specific blogs.

vSAN Scrubber changes 7.0U1c

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 19:04:48 +0000

vSAN Scrubber is a background operation at DOM owner. Scrubber performs detection (scrub) and fixing (recover) of checksum and IO errors.

Mostly Checksum errors and I/O errors which are seen in vSAN environment is due to medium errors against the physical capacity disks where the data is persisted. These errors don’t surface until we try to read the object from both mirrors (in case of raid-1 objects). We might always be performing reads on a single mirror especially in case of Stretched cluster where site affinity is set to either preferred site or secondary site to avoid cross site traffic.

Advanced Cross-vCenter vMotion

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 12:00:07 +0000

VMware had initially launched a fling version called “Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility” which was used by a lot of VMware administrators/customers to migrate workloads/VMs between two vCenters which are managed individually (not under the same SSO domains). This advanced “Cross-vCenter vMotion”, a.k.a. XVM GUI tool is now natively built into vSphere 7.0U1c which allows bulk transfer of VMs between vCenter instances without the need of any additional fling/plugin installation. XVM does not depend on linked mode, which means that the vcenter servers can be in a separate SSO domains and can be used for migration between vCenter servers on-premise (VC to VC) and in the cloud (VC to VMC on any cloud platforms).

vSAN 7 Update 1 FastBoot – Feature Walkthrough

Sun, 20 Sep 2020 09:03:49 +0000

vSAN hosts reboots when compared to regular ESXi hosts generally take longer due to its log structured system to capture and track all the modifications occurring at the write buffer / Cache Disks, vSAN uses an in-memory table to track changes to the blocks, LBA tables, bitmaps etc. This in memory table is always lost when a vSAN host is rebooted. At the time of boot vSAN takes a long time to recover these entries from each of the disk groups to reconstruct the in-memory table, the time spent to perform this recovery generally depends on the size of LLOG/PLOG that needs to be recovered from each of the disk groups. vSAN 7.0U1 / vSAN 7 Update 1 performs a “save and restore” workflow to rebuild vSAN in-memory metadata allowing “Faster vSAN Host Restarts” or Fastboot.

Enhanced Durability Maintenance Mode – Feature Walkthrough

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 09:05:00 +0000

What is Durability Component?, Lets consider a scenario of a three node vSAN cluster, where one of the host is placed in maintenance mode. All the vSAN objects will now be accessible with “Reduced Redundancy” mode which means that any failures that are encountered on the surviving two nodes will lead to data unavailability and sometimes data loss situation even with all recovery efforts from a support perspective.

Whenever there is one or more hosts placed in maintenance mode with ensure accessibility, vSAN 7 Update 1 introduces a method to write new changes by spawning a new component called “Durability Component“. Since new changes for the objects that are being written to this “Durability Component” if we were to encounter a failure on one of surviving host, exiting maintenance mode on the host which has stale components will sync the changes with the Durability Component and becomes an active component again and the Durability Component is automatically cleaned up by the CLOM service on that node . This helps ensure the durability of the changed data in the event that the one host holding the updated object replica failed during this maintenance window

HCI Mesh™ -Feature Walkthrough

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 08:58:45 +0000

**HCI Mesh

** is one of the new feature that is introduced with vSAN 7 Update 1 release. HCI Mesh

provides disaggregation of compute and storage by allowing vSAN customers to share vSAN datastores between two or more clusters. vSAN administrators can setup a relationship between two to five clusters and allow these clusters to borrow/share vSAN datastore capacity.

We can achieve better compute and storage utilization across the datacenter and avoid unnecessary purchase of hardware per cluster. Example : VM hosted on cluster-1 can have all of its disks and namespace provisioned from a different cluster within the same datacenter, allows vSphere administrators to do a regular vMotion (not SvMotion) between one or more clusters which are part of this **HCI Mesh

** topology. This feature uses native vSAN VMKernel adapter and existing RDT protocol to communicate in the mesh topology with other cluster vSAN nodes which is simplistic and efficient.

Shared Witness – Feature walkthrough

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 08:26:01 +0000

vSAN 7 Update 1 now gives us high efficiency to this two node “Shared Witness” topology by allowing vSAN administrators to use a single shared witness for up to 64 two node vSAN clusters and hence reduces witness server/appliance footprint/resource usage in the central datacenter. The new UI for the witness appliance under Cluster->Monitor->vSAN->Two Node Clusters.

Two-Node vSAN ROBO cluster configuration was introduced some time back with vSAN 6.2 release couple of years back, this architecture was used primarily in large number of small branch offices, retail sites, IOT etc. All two node vSAN cluster configuration always needed a dedicated witness appliance for each of its deployment until vSAN 7. This means that there was a large footprint of witness appliances in the central site which hosts witnesses for all of its retail two node ROBO sites.

IOInsight vSAN 7.0 U1 – Feature walkthrough

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 06:38:07 +0000

This blog article is a feature walkthrough on “vSAN 7 Update1 IOInsight” and understand how this can help us to approach/investigate performance related issues on VMs running on vSAN.

IOinsight has been available in the VMware-Flings community market place for quite sometime. vSAN engineering team has now included IOInsight natively with vSAN Performance services with this latest release of vSAN7 Update 1. This provide deep dive performance metrics and insights on individual VM and VMDK level, so that this data can be used to mitigate performance related issues on specific VMs and VMDKs.

Technical Overview – vSAN 7 Update 1

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 06:16:40 +0000

vSAN 7.0 U1/ vSAN 7 Update1 is one of the biggest release for vSAN in last couple of years, there is a long list of new features that are added/released with this version. This blog article talks briefly on all the important features for vSAN7 Update1 / vSAN 7.0 U1. I will be covering all the features exclusively on newer dedicated posts for each of the features.

-1 **VMware HCI Mesh

** -vSAN 7.0 U1

vSAN 7 U1 Compression-Only – Feature Walkthrough

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:30:00 +0000

In this blog article we will look at the vSAN 7 U1 Compression-Only feature ,its benefits and how it fares with other space saving features on the previous releases of vSAN.

I have been asked by a lot vSAN users about vSAN only allowing us to enable Deduplication and Compression together as feature in all the releases since vSAN 6.x. Finally VMware made this announcement for vSAN compression only mode is here with vSAN 7 Update1 we can totally eliminate the additional overheads for Deduplication when using Compression-Only yet get good space savings. Let dive straight into key difference between Deduplication & Compression vs Compression-Only.

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.

SRM 8.3 & vSphere Replication 8.3 walk through

Sat, 11 Apr 2020 16:58:19 +0000

SRM 8.3 and vSphere Replication 8.3 bring in long awaited features,UI changes, security and performance improvements. In this blog we shall be going over some of the features and enhancements which you may consider to upgrade from the previous releases to this version as soon as possible as these features helps to reduce a lot of manual work and adds value to your every day task. I have not covered steps to deploy VR and SRM appliances as I have already written a blog post for Install-Configure-migrate-SRM-VR-8.2, you may follow same steps for deployment and configuration.

WSFC with Native Shared Disks on vSAN

Sun, 08 Dec 2019 02:37:07 +0000

With introduction of vSAN 6.7 U3 / vSphere 6.7 U3 we now have native support for SCSI-3 Persistent reservation on vSAN objects. This means that we no longer need vSAN iSCSI targets for creating application level clustering services like Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC) which needs to share a disk in order to determine ownership across the application cluster.

This new feature allows for VMs running WSFC to use a shared VMDK on a vSAN datastore by creating SCSI controllers in physical Mode and then create and share vmdks using independent-persistent presentation mode. This drastically reduces the time in deployment and configuration on WSFC when compared to previous vSAN releases which requires us to configure thru vSAN iSCSI targets and also comes with its overhead .

How Storage Policy affects performance on vSAN?

Thu, 30 May 2019 17:40:02 +0000

In this guide we will be looking at how we can use different storage policy on vSAN datastore to fine tune performance for the virtual machines running on a vSAN Datastore . We will look at different tools which can be run from the guest level and also few tests run with HCIBench .

Before you start reading thru this blog I highly encourage you to check out “Achieve-Best-Performance-on-vSAN” to get any understanding vSAN performance benchmark tool called HCIBench.

Whats new with HCIBench 2.0?

Tue, 21 May 2019 14:22:15 +0000

We all know that there is a newer version of HCIBench 2.0 which was announced last month I was able to deploy and run this on one of the All-Flash Clusters , all new changes significantly seemed to have improved user experiences from the previous version . I request you to go thru “Detailed Guide for HCIBench-1.6x ” if you are looking for steps to deploy and configure HCIBench . Also better understanding the use case for HCIBench see : How to Achieve Best Performance Using HCIBench .

How to Install,Configure and Migrate to Site Recovery Manager 8.2 ?

Sat, 11 May 2019 19:13:49 +0000

This guide will walk you thru all the new features about SRM 8.2 and vSphere Replication and steps to install , configure , manage and migrate to SRM 8.2 . Also covers all the new functionalities around vSphere Replication Aplliance 8.2

How to Install , Configure and Manage SRM 8.2 and VR 8.2 ?
How to migrate from Windows based SRM to SRM-Appliance?
Methods to install SRA on the new SRM-VA.
How to configure replication for Encrypted Virtual machines?

I am really exited about the new version of Site recovery manager 8.2 which now comes with an Appliance version and bring in “All New Experience” to the administrators to easily deploy and manage SRM .

How to use HCIBench and achieve Best performance on vSAN ?

Sun, 17 Feb 2019 05:19:45 +0000

Here is a detailed guide on how we may approach ways to optimize a vSAN cluster to deliver best performance on a cluster and find your answers to your questions.

How do we assess vSAN performance ?

What can I expect from a specific hardware?

How best can we tweak vSAN clusters to achieve best performance ?

What are the tools which we can use to use to benchmark vSAN performance ?

I highly encourage you to go thru the guide for Deployment Guide for HCIBench before you read this blog about running HCIBench Tests .

How to Convert standard vSAN Cluster to Stretched Cluster & viceversa

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 16:31:04 +0000

Here is a quick and easy guide to convert a normal vSAN cluster to a stretched cluster & converting a stretched cluster to a regular vSAN cluster .

Converting a Standard vSAN cluster to Stretched Cluster

I can categorize the tasks we will need to perform when we convert a normal cluster to a stretched cluster into three sections and I would also quote some of the examples where this will be your requirement in real life situation .

How to Re-Config Replication with existing seed on vSAN

Tue, 02 Oct 2018 02:56:15 +0000

I have been asked about re-configuring replication for a VM without deleting the destination folder for a VM which is already replicated . In a traditional storage , we were simply renaming the folders on the destination datastore (Can be a local or a remote site) , we used to re-name the folder at the target site , perform a force stop replication at source and target site and simply re-configure replication to the same folder using existing seeds to avoid a full-sync between the two sites .

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 .

PNOMA – A vSAN Troubleshooting Framework

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 21:30:52 +0000

There are many questions revolving around different layers of vSAN back-end architecture and how we can isolate problems with vSAN or in general approach towards troubleshooting a problem with vSAN . Here is an article which can help you isolate and potentially resolve a problem which involves a vSAN environment by isolating the problem in different layers by breaking down architecture in a simple way.

The approach towards troubleshooting a problem can be categorized in 5 layers similar to OSI model of networking . Application layer , Management layer , Object layer , Object layer and physical layer . We further see examples on how we can tag/categorize issues with each layer , which will help you figure out the source of the problem and quickly finding a solution . You may not be able to find the solution to a problem at all times however be able to categorize the issue under one of these layers , being able to explain the issue accurately to the Technical Support team can help them quickly narrow down the problem and fix that .

How to install and configure Site Recovery 8.1?

Tue, 17 Jul 2018 16:35:36 +0000

New Blog Post for “How to install , configure and Migrate to SRM 8.2” ,if you are interested to deploy SRM 8.2 instead of SRM 8.1 .

SRM 8.2 comes with the appliance edition and is far more easier and faster to deploy and configure . This was just released in May 2019 .

Site recovery Manager 8.1 and vSphere Replication 8.1 is available out in the market for quite sometime . Here is my First impressions and a simple guide to deploy -configure Site recovery Manager and vSphere replication 8.1 , comparison with older version and conclusion .

Troubleshooting vSAN Encryption Deep Dive

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 15:43:56 +0000

I highly encourage you to check out my previous blog to understand how vSAN encryption works before you jump into troubleshooting problems with vSAN and a KMS server .

This blog should give you a general approach towards troubleshooting problems with vSAN-encryption and also be able to look at a specific log location in order to isolate and fix a specific problem . I have also included certain test-case scenario to see how the logging looks on the host when there is an issue with vSAN-encryption .

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 .

How to troubleshoot issues with vSAN Storage policy compliance and VASA Providers ?

Sun, 06 May 2018 15:00:31 +0000

At many times we wonder why we are not able to re-apply policy on a vSAN object or a virtual machine , it may be grayed out and many VMs on the vSAN datastore shows up as non-compliant . Here is a complete guide which helps you understanding the role and importance of the VASA providers in a vSAN environment ,the difference between the latest vSAN 6.7 VP and previous versions and troubleshooting methods to fix VASA issues .

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 .

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 .

New Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility

Sun, 24 Dec 2017 03:04:12 +0000

New “Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility” which is GUI based is now available on the VMware-labs

This is a boon to many of the administrators , who were earlier using the CLI utility or even the Regular vCenter servers in the same SSO domain . This new tool will allow administrators to XVmotion the VMs between vcenter servers that are not in the same SSO Domain . Also allows XVMotion between a vcenter running any flavour of 6.0 to a 6.5 vcenter server . However XVmotion doesnt work the other away around that is between a 6.5 vCenter to another 6.0 Vcenter server . All XVmotion between the same releases should work smoothly .

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”.

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 .

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 .

Troubleshooting vSAN cluster partition vSAN 6.7 and vSAN 6.6

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 16:13:25 +0000

Here are the troubleshooting Steps to resolve Unicastagent issues on vSAN cluster post upgrade usually from vSAN 6.1 / 6.2 / 6.5 to vSAN to 6.6 6.50d and below as we no longer use multicast from version 6.7 and unicastagent list is not updated with correct details on one or more hosts and you also vSAN network partition on one or more hosts .

In these cases you will need to manually add the unicastagent address list on all hosts part of the cluster , follow thru the steps listed below .

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 .

How to configure Pool, Luns, replication and SRA for SRM -UnityVSA

Sun, 18 Jun 2017 16:20:04 +0000

So far you must have seen , how to deploy and complete UnityVSA initial configuration here . Now lets see How to configure Pool, Luns and SRA for SRM -UnityVSA .This is a perfect and easy solution to configure Array based replication LAB for SRM .

Lets get Started !!

Step 1 : Add a new virtual disk to Unity-VSA from vSphere

Right click your UnityVSA virtual machine , allocate a new virtual disk to be used for pool creation . Please note for the free Edition the disk size can only go up to 4 TB . You will need to do the same process at both sites .

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

vVOL lab setup , SRM Array based replication using UnityVSA

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 05:19:28 +0000

How to build a perfect vVOL lab setup , SRM Array based replication using UnityVSA . All you need is the DELL-EMC Unity VSA latest version , which can be downloaded here as an OVA . Once you have that downloaded , you will now proceed to deploy that on you ESXi host (5.5 and above) , please make sure that you have enough resource on the host 12GB RAM and 2 vCPU available to get this booted up successfully . This guide shows you how you can configure vVOL lab setup , SRM Array based replication UnityVSA . Please feel free to comment on this article if you could not find what you were looking for and if you have any suggestions.

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 .

Posts on blogs.hareeshkg.com

What’s new with vSAN Data Protection (Snap Service Appliance)

What is vSAN Data Protection?

State of Disaggregated HCI (HCI Mesh)-vSAN 8 U1

Introduction

Large Write Buffer for vSAN 8 OSA Architecture

Introduction

Native vSAN Trace Object

vSAN-ESA SPBM and Compoment placements

Introduction

vSAN ESA – Log Structured File System

How LFS works?

My take on vSAN-ESA

vSAN Performance 7.0 U3 Whats new?

vSAN 7.0U2 Performance-Whats New?

vSAN 7 U1 Component Placement

vSAN Scrubber changes 7.0U1c

Advanced Cross-vCenter vMotion

vSAN 7 Update 1 FastBoot – Feature Walkthrough

Enhanced Durability Maintenance Mode – Feature Walkthrough

HCI Mesh™ -Feature Walkthrough

Shared Witness – Feature walkthrough

IOInsight vSAN 7.0 U1 – Feature walkthrough

Technical Overview – vSAN 7 Update 1

-1 **VMware HCI Mesh

vSAN 7 U1 Compression-Only – Feature Walkthrough

How to upgrade to VxRail™ 7.0

SRM 8.3 & vSphere Replication 8.3 walk through

WSFC with Native Shared Disks on vSAN

How Storage Policy affects performance on vSAN?

Whats new with HCIBench 2.0?

How to Install,Configure and Migrate to Site Recovery Manager 8.2 ?

How to use HCIBench and achieve Best performance on vSAN ?

How to Convert standard vSAN Cluster to Stretched Cluster & viceversa

Converting a Standard vSAN cluster to Stretched Cluster

How to Re-Config Replication with existing seed on vSAN

What is vSAN Support Insight – CEIP?

How to Configure vSAN Encryption?

Introduction to vSAN Encryption

PNOMA – A vSAN Troubleshooting Framework

How to install and configure Site Recovery 8.1?

New Blog Post for “How to install , configure and Migrate to SRM 8.2” ,if you are interested to deploy SRM 8.2 instead of SRM 8.1 .

Troubleshooting vSAN Encryption Deep Dive

Unable to manage vSAN on Webclient

How to troubleshoot issues with vSAN Storage policy compliance and VASA Providers ?

Why does vSAN disks get unmounted ?

vSAN iSCSI targets configuration deep dive

Why and How to Deploy vSAN HCI Bench for vSAN?

Understanding VM-Storage-Policies

New Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility

Correlating VXRAIL release with VMware Build Numbers

Understanding vsan Objects and Components

VxRAIL Hosts going Non-responsive due to a plugin conflict

Things to know for vSAN management

Virtual machine storage policy compliance

How to Silence Warnings on vSAN health Plugin

How to Login into RVC?

How to log into RVC on a VCSA (appliance)

Step1 : Login to VCSA with root credentials .

How to perform vSAN cluster maintenance activities

Upgrade to vSAN 6.6

Troubleshooting vSAN cluster partition vSAN 6.7 and vSAN 6.6

How to Upgrade vSAN CLuster with Best practices

How to configure Pool, Luns, replication and SRA for SRM -UnityVSA

Step 1 : Add a new virtual disk to Unity-VSA from vSphere

vSAN deployment and administrator’s Guide

vVOL lab setup , SRM Array based replication using UnityVSA

Download vmem file from a vSAN datastore