How to throttle vSAN resync traffic in vSphere 7.0. Resync throttling has been a feature of vSAN since version 6.6 (April 2017) and the functionality to set it existed in the vSphere Client GUI through to 6.7 before it was removed. However, you still have the ability to perform this throttling using PowerCLI. There is …

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A few weeks ago I had to shutdown a vSAN Cluster temporarily for a planned site-wide 24 hour power outage that was blacking out a datacentre. With the amount of warning and a multi-datacentre design this wasn’t an issue, but I made use of vSphere tags and some Powershell/PowerCLI to help with the evacuation and …

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Or “How I’ve come to love my vSAN Ready Nodes” I’ll admit it, some years ago I was very cynical about HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI). Outside of VDI workloads I couldn’t see how it would fit in my environment - and this was all down to the scaling model. With the building-block architecture of HCI; storage, …

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In the process of upgrading a vSAN ReadyNode cluster from ESXi 6.5 to 6.7 a warning appeared in the vSAN Health check. The first host in the cluster had gone through the upgrade and was now showing the warning “Controller driver is VMware certified” (Note 1 in the image below). The Dell HBA330 card was using an older …

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One of the new developments that caught my eye at VMworld this year was the introduction of file services to the VMware vSAN software-defined storage platform. vSAN already offers VMDK storage to vSphere and the ability to host iSCSI volumes, but this feature will allow NFS and SMB file-shares to be hosted directly on …

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This “HCI Futures” session at VMworld US was hosted by two VPs from the Storage and Availability Business Unit, plus a customer guest. It covered the new features recently added to the vSAN environment with the release of 6.7 Update 1, alongside discussion of the possible future direction of VMware in the …

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vSAN licenses are assigned per-cluster, so whilst the total number of vSAN licenses in a vCenter inventory might match the total number of vSAN host CPUs, they may not be assigned correctly to the clusters. This will trigger the critical vCenter alarm “License inventory monitoring”. This will also occur if a cluster is …

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There are three major editions* of vSAN 6.6 available - “Standard”, “Advanced”, and “Enterprise”- so other than price what’s the difference between the three? *aside from the “vSAN for Desktop” and “vSAN for ROBO” lines which address specific use cases- look out for later posts focusing on these. Standard Standard is …

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What is vSAN? This is a first post in a series on vSAN, VMware’s software-defined-storage offering. vSAN uses disks within the ESXi hosts to create a resilient scalable shared storage platform for the virtual infrastructure providing many of the features of SAN/NAS shared storage without the need for additional …

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Wednesday morning and VMworld continues… Here’s a look at my sessions from another day in Barcelona. General Session The big announcements of Day 2 gave way to some more detail in the Day 3 Keynote, kicked off by Sanjay Poonen focusing on the digital transformation happening in the EUC world. VMware has 66,000 EUC …

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