VSAN6.2 Archives -

VSAN: Stretched Cluster Failure Scenarios explained

January 7, 2019 Stijn Depril 1

One of the most interesting features of VSAN, is the stretched cluster capability. It is safe to say, when we first introduced the stretched cluster capability, it wasn’t 100% ready. Sure, it worked, but it needed some improvements. Meanwhile we have made several improvements and have extended the stretched cluster feature set and it is now fully functioning & enterprise ready. Of course, with great claims come great responsibilities. So because we are always dealing with customer data, I always have a conversation with the customer about the actual expectations. This is especially the case if the client is thinking about using enterprise features such as stretched clustering. Some customers have a very good understanding of business continuity others are not […]

The Evolution of Storage – A VMUG presentation (Dutch)

May 17, 2018 Stijn Depril 0

Back in March, I shared a presentation with Duncan Epping during the NLVMUG. This VMUG is one of the biggest and oldest VMUGs in the world. I presented the current state followed by Duncan, who is very well positioned to cover all the things that are still work in progress. A month ago the NLVMUG Usercon published the presentation video on YouTube. Enjoy this presentation.

Back 2 VSAN Basics

April 26, 2018 Stijn Depril 0

I see VSAN “in the wild” on a daily basis and very often I get questions about the basics of VSAN. Don’t get me wrong, questions are absolutely a good thing! What I also see, is that people often ignore the practices and assume it will be OK with a next/next/finish. You guessed it right: This doesn’t go well! Therefor I have decided to start with ‘a VSAN basics’ blog series. What is VSAN What’s important to run VSAN well And why is it important for the success of your project Let’s start with a bit of history For the last decades we have been procuring new storage in the same way as we used to do in the previous […]

Lets Talk About Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr #Sexigraf #Monitoring #vExpert

October 9, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I went to my first VMUG recently and it was great! I met plenty of new people and learned a lot of new things. I got in a few discussions about monitoring and I mentioned that I was pretty fond of Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr . I found it interesting that a few people had never heard of this great FREE product. I mean monitoring is important, whether you want to know what your cluster utilisation is or how your datastore latency is or how your VSAN cluster is doing. Keeping stats for a period of time is also important because you want to be able to monitor trends etc. There are plenty of products out there that can help you […]

Journey to VCIX-NV – Intro

July 23, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

This is my series regarding my journey towards VCIX-NV. This series is not about giving you a full hands-on guide for the exam as many have already done this well, but this is only about adding more remarks about the lab issues and other useful resources. For those who don’t know VCIX-NV is a practical-lab certification for VMware NSX. To be able to pass the exam you will need a home-lab or some old servers at work which have been setup with vSphere and NSX so you can get your hands dirty. This is just an introduction I will list my used resources, my home lab configuration and a short description of what my virtual lab is gonna be like. Used Resources: VMware […]

Bootstrap a Single-node VSAN Cluster under Running vCenter Server

July 23, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

In my NSX Lab, I needed a single-node cluster with VSAN enabled beside another normal cluster with three nodes. William Lam has a genius post about how to bootstrap a single-node VSAN cluster to add your vCenter on it in your lab, but unfortunately even though his advice works perfectly when you have a single ESXi host, it does not work well when you already have a vCenter in place. My story begins from the VSAN Default Storage Policy. This policy enforces that a deployment of VMs needs to have: Failures to Tolerate set to 1 (FTT =1 ): That means that the minimum number of nodes has to be 3 nodes and each VM disk has to be configured in RAID-1. Number of disk stripes=1: […]

VSAN 6.2 Online resource calculator

June 14, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

Hello All! Yes, this is an Online Excel sheet to calculate how many hosts, storage, physical CPU’s, virtual CPU’s, RAM, Cache and so on you need. I still need to add the bits and pieces to calculate the amount of components, disks and disk groups which are needed to serve all workloads, but I figured this might already be useful to some. I am human, so mistakes happen, so if you spot any mistakes or omissions, please let us know. You can find the online excel table at the bottom and fields can be modified. Contrary to the VSAN 6.0 calculator I have decided not to show the whole table but only the boxes you have to fill in and the results. To see […]

REVIEW: Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) 2nd Edition

June 6, 2016 Kim Bottu 1

On Friday my pre-order of Duncan Epping’s and Cormac Hogan’s updated book for VSAN was finally available for download. A few clicks on the website of PearsonITcertification and I was ready to start reading. I took the whole weekend to read this book. The structure of the book: The books reads very pleasantly mostly because it has been well structured, and despite the technical nature of the content of this book (of course this is why we buy it), it is easy to follow. ‘Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) 2nd Edition’ contains ten chapters: Introduction to VSAN VSAN Prerequisites and Requirements for Deployment VSAN Installation and Configuration VM Storage Policies on VSAN Architectural Details VM Storage Policies and Virtual Machine Provisioning Management and Maintenance Stretched Cluster Designing […]