VSAN6.2 Archives -

My VCAP6.5-Design Experience

April 27, 2018 Manny Sidhu 1

This past weekend I sat for and successfully passed the VCAP6.5-Design exam. It was great to finally pass an exam on the first go (I’ve had a torrid run recently, that’s going to be another post on its own). Here’re some details about the exam environment, my experience and suggestions for future takers. Exam center: When booking the exam I needed to find a center that offered exams on the weekend. Turns out Aviation Training Service Victoria in Airport West was the only one that offered Saturdays and Sundays. I booked an 8am appointment for the exam, I thought I rocked up nice and early at about 7.40, lo and behold the parking was full as. The center also offers […]

Rebuilding your VSAN lab in Ravello is easy and takes no time!

February 1, 2018 Kim Bottu 2

I really like the Free vEXPERT Ravello tier to run some quick tests but it has few disadvantages: The limited amount of CPU hours. The time it takes to upload images, create VMs, blueprints, applications and networks. The time it takes to create a new lab environment from scratch can take a lot of hours. The more servers you add to your lab environment, the longer it will take to create it. But as soon as I had figured out how to create my applications, VMs and blueprints, it was very easy to come up with a plan to deploy new test environments in different regions or to replace my corrupted labs with only a few mouse clicks. The time to deploy a […]

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 […]