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 […]

RAVELLO: Troubleshooting VSAN Network connectivity issues

March 28, 2018 Kim Bottu 0

Yesterday night, I was setting up a new VSAN cluster on Ravello and got hit with a network issue: Apparently my network was partitioned!   The network for all hosts has been setup similarly on all hosts, so the network partition issue didn’t make much sense. MGMT Kernel: MGMT and vMotion traffic vmk0 10.1.0.1x VSAN Kernel: VSAN traffic vmk1 10.1.0.2x Unfortunately esxi004.vmusketeers.local had been added to a separate partition! Rather than checking each host separately, I used the VSAN PowerCLI commands to figure out if my hosts were properly configured for VSAN networking. PS C:\Windows\system32> $vsanhealth.networkhealth HostResult : {VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl, VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl, VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl, VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl} HostCommunicationFailure : HostDisconnected : HostInEsxMaintenanceMode : HostInVsanMaintenanceMode : HostWithVsanDisabled : IssueFound : True LargePingTestSuccess : False MatchingIPSubnets : True MatchingMulticastConfig […]

RAVELLO: Windows vCenter 6.5 vCenter server errors: 500, 503

December 20, 2017 Kim Bottu 3

If you use a cleanly installed Windows based vCenter server in the #VEXPERT FREE TIER of RAVELLO cloud you might have seen the following errors as well. For me there errors were the cause that my VSAN lab would not properly work anymore, so I had to find a solution fast. I assume these errors appear because in the Free Tier,  Ravello isn’t always the fastest environment to start up your server nor to run your workloads. So some services might be timing out while starting up. This will result in a handful of vCenter services not being reachable and an unreachable management plane.  Yes this also applies to a Windows based vCenter server  with an embedded PSC. A server error occurred. [500] […]

VSAN 6.5 and 6.6.1 resources calculator

November 11, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

The old sheet has been modified to fall in line with the “10.2 Capacity Sizing Example II” of the VMware® vSAN™ Design and Sizing Guide for 6.5 and 6.6.1. You can download the spreadsheet here: https://vmusketeers.com/vsan-6-6-1-resources-calculator/   Kim   ps: If you see errors or have remarks,  feel free to comment.