Category: vSAN/VCF

#VMware Validated Design With Virtual SAN And NSX Running High Workload #Oracle 12c

VMware Validated Design With Virtual SAN And…

The rigorous process of following a VMware Validated Design (V2D) to build a Business Critical Applications (BCA) database architecture was made more interesting by focusing on Virtual SAN and NSX on Quanta Hardware with Intel SSDs. On this All-Flash architecture, we chose to run the Oracle RDBMS version 12c under high workload using the formidable workload generator known as the “Silly Little Oracle Benchmark” or “SLOB”. Six compute nodes were concurrently loaded with the SLOB tool which generated an extreme workload that would be highly uncommon in any practical customer environment. The details are available in the full report linked below, but it should be noted that at 200k IOPS the read latency averaged 5ms. This was truly a BCA…Read More

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Quick Post – #VSAN and Log Insight Custom Alerting Example

Quick Post – VSAN and Log Insight Custom…

Log Insight is one of those great VMware products that needs to get more airplay as it has quiet a few applications other than a run of the mill log parser…in this post I’ll go through configuring a basic VSAN alert to detect disk failures. Once VSAN has been configured and deployed there is a new set of alerting parameters that VMware Admins need to be aware of that would usually be part of a traditional storage platforms feature set. Like all storage we need to be made aware of any issues with the supporting hardware such as Storage Controllers and Physical Disks. VSAN 6.2 comes with an excellent Health Monitor that allows you to get a quick overview of a VSAN instances state and will alert through vCenter if any issues arise.

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Virtual SAN Availability Features and Capabilities in 20 Minutes – Punching Clouds

Virtual SAN Availability Features and…

As a follow-up to the Virtual SAN 6.2 space efficiency features and capabilities presentation, I shared last week from the “Virtual SAN Take 20 Webcast Series”, here is the second episode where I focused on the overall availability and capabilities features of Virtual SAN.

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Disks Will Fail – #VSAN Doesn’t!

Disks Will Fail – VSAN Doesn’t!

I was building my lab with VSAN backed storage – because I did not have a compatible RAID card I grouped the disks as a RAID-0 and presented it to VSAN. It worked and worked well – VSAN saw one big disk of about 1.6 TB (Had three disks worth 550GB each).

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Deploying Virtual SAN Over L2/L3 Networks with Arista Networking Devices

Deploying Virtual SAN Over L2/L3 Networks with…

Earlier this year around the March timeframe, I published a white paper providing network configuration guidance for deploying Virtual SAN across L2 and L3 networks. In the white paper, I covered all of the necessary configuration artifacts required to prepare and build a routed network for the deployment of Virtual SAN. In the paper, I provided all of the required configuration examples for all of the necessary networking devices (L2 and L3 devices) for two different vendors (Cisco and Brocade)

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[Video] #VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Deduplication, Compression, and Erasure Coding

VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Deduplication,…

Space efficiency with Virtual SAN 6.2 deduplication, compression, and erasure coding.

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[Video] #VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Limiting IOPS

VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Limiting IOPS

Limiting IOPS with Virtual SAN Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM)

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Virtual SAN Space Efficiency Capabilities in 25 Minutes – Punching Clouds

Virtual SAN Space Efficiency Capabilities in 25…

Earlier this week I got an opportunity to participate in a Webcast series titled “Virtual SAN Take 20” where I covered some of the new space efficiency and availability capabilities of Virtual SAN 6.2 and provided some useful demonstrations of the features and capabilities. The information I covered and demonstrated is applicable for all Virtual SAN Ready Nodes and the EMC/VCE VXRAIL engineered appliances that are powered by VMware’s Hyper-Converged software package with Virtual SAN.

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#VSAN 6.2 ESXi Patch Updates + DELL PERC Firmware Updates

VSAN 6.2 ESXi Patch Updates + DELL PERC…

I wanted to cover off a couple of important updates in this post relating to the DELL PERC storage controller Firmware and software drivers as well as an important new release of ESXi 6.0 that addresses a couple of issues with VSAN and also fixes to more VMXNET3 problems which seem to keep popping up. Read further below for the ESXi fixes but firstly a couple of weeks ago I posted about the new certified driver updates for the DELL PERC based storage controllers that VMware released for VSAN 6.2. This driver was only half of the fix as DELL also released new Firmware for most of the PERC based controllers listed below.

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600GB write buffer limit for #VSAN? (via Yellow Bricks)

600GB write buffer limit for VSAN?

I get this question on a regular basis and it has been explained many many times, I figured I would dedicate a blog to it. Now, Cormac has written a very lengthy blog on the topic and I am not going to repeat it, I will simply point you to the math he has provided around it. I do however want to provide a quick summary:

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Virtualization And #VMware Virtual SAN … The Old Married Couple

Virtualization And VMware Virtual SAN … The Old…

I have not posted many blogs recently as I’ve been in South Africa. I have, however, been hard at work on the latest release of VMware vSphere 6.0 Update 2 and VMware Virtual SAN 6.2. Some amazing features are included that will make life a lot easier and add some exciting new functionality to your hyper-converged infrastructure.

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Proactive Monitoring Virtual SAN 6.2 Infrastructures With New Content Pack For vRealize Log Insight

Proactive Monitoring Virtual SAN 6.2…

Back in December 2015, I published an article announcing the release of the Virtual SAN content pack for vRealize Log Insight. In the article, I delved into some of the key details of what the content pack delivers with the ability to automate the management of Virtual SAN logs. The product’s ability to combine the aggregation of analytics, together with search capabilities it provides operational intelligence and enterprise-wide visibility into dynamic environments with Virtual SAN.

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#VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Workload (via ntpro.nl)

VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 with Virtual Desktop…

This white paper evaluates the performance of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) applications with Virtual SAN 6.2. The Virtual Desktop Infrastructure delivers desktop service to end users by running virtual machines on consolidated clusters in the datacenter.

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Hot Off The Press: Virtual SAN 6.2 Network Design Guide

Hot Off The Press: Virtual SAN 6.2 Network…

Virtual SAN is a hypervisor-converged, software-defined storage solution for the software-defined data center. It is the first policy-driven storage product designed for VMware vSphere® environments that simplifies and streamlines storage provisioning and management.

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Proactive Monitoring VSAN 6.2 Infrastructures w/ New Content Pack for vRealize Log Insight

Proactive Monitoring Virtual SAN 6.2…

Back in December 2015, I published an article announcing the release of the Virtual SAN content pack for vRealize Log Insight. In the article, I delved into some of the key details of what the content pack delivers with the ability to automate the management of Virtual SAN logs. The product’s ability to combine the aggregation of analytics, together with search capabilities it provides operational intelligence and enterprise-wide visibility into dynamic environments with Virtual SAN.

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#VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Network Design Guide

VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Network Design Guide

Virtual SAN is a hypervisor-converged, software-defined storage solution for the software-defined data center. It is the first policy-driven storage product designed for VMware vSphere® environments that simplifies and streamlines storage provisioning and management.

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#VSAN 6.2 + DELL PERC: Important Certified Driver Updates (via anthonyspiteri.net)

VSAN 6.2 + DELL PERC: Important Certified…

As many of us rejoiced at the release of VSAN 6.2 that came with vSphere 6 Update 2…those of us running DELL PERC based storage controllers where quickly warned of a potential issues and where told to not upgrade. VMwareKB 2144614 referenced these issues and stated that the PERC H730 and FD332 found in DELL Server platforms where not certified for VSAN 6.2 pending onging investigations. The storage controllers that where impacted are listed below.

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LSI3108 based controllers now #VSAN 6.2 Certified – Blah, Cloud.

LSI3108 based controllers now VSAN 6.2…

After a long an arduous certification and regression testing process following many problems with LSI 3108 based controllers that I have been using for VSAN they are finally VSAN 6.2 certified.

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How HA handles a #VSAN Stretched Cluster Site Partition (via yellow-bricks.com)

How HA handles a VSAN Stretched Cluster Site…

Over the past couple of weeks I have had some interesting questions from folks about different VSAN Stretched failure scenarios, in particular what happens during a VSAN Stretched Cluster site partition. These questions were in particular about site partitions and how HA and VSAN know which VMs to fail-over and which VMs to power-off.

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All-Flash Versus Hybrid #VMware Virtual SAN™: Performance vs. Price

All-Flash Versus Hybrid VMware Virtual SAN™:…

How do databases and business critical applications compare on all-flash versus hybrid VMware Virtual SAN? We worked jointly with ESG to compare the performance and cost impact.

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