A brief overview of new Virtual SAN 6.0 features and functionality
The embargo on what’s new in vSphere 6.0 has now been lifted, so we can now start to discuss publicly about new features and functionality. For the last number of months, I’ve been heavily involved in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
VSAN 6.0 Part 1 – New quorum mechanism
vSphere 6.0 released yesterday. It included the new version of Virtual SAN – 6.0. I now wish to start sharing some of the new features and functionality with you. One of things we always enforced with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
VSAN 6.0 Part 2 – v2 On-disk Format Upgrade Considerations
I was heavily involved in the documentation effort for VSAN 6.0, but I know that not everyone likes to RTFM, so to speak. What I thought I would do in this post is give an overview of the upgrade...
View ArticleClik here to view.
VSAN 6.0 Part 3 – New Default Datastore Policy
One of the most common issues I got questions about in VSAN 5.5 was “why is VSAN deploying thick disks, when all of the documentation stated that VSAN deploys thin disks”? The answer was quite straight...
View ArticleClik here to view.
VSAN 6.0 Part 4 – All-Flash VSAN Capacity Tier Considerations
In Virtual SAN version 6.0, VMware introduced support for an all-flash VSAN. In other words, both the caching layer and the capacity layer could be made up of flash-based devices such as SSDs....
View ArticleVSAN 6.0 Part 5 – new vsanSparse snapshots
There is a new snapshot format introduced in VSAN 6.0 called vsanSparse. These replace the traditional vmfsSparse format (redo logs). The vmfsSparse format was used when snapshots of VMs were taken in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
VSAN 6.0 Part 6 – Maintenance Mode Changes
There is a subtle difference in maintenance mode behaviours between VSAN version 5.5 and VSAN version 6.0. In Virtual SAN version 5.5, when a host is placed into maintenance mode with the “Ensure...
View ArticleClik here to view.
VSAN 6.0 Part 8 – Fault Domains
One of the really nice new features of VSAN 6.0 is fault domains. Previously, there was very little control over where VSAN placed virtual machine components. In order to protect against something like...
View ArticleClik here to view.
VSAN 6.0 Part 9 – Proactive Re-balance
This is another nice new feature of Virtual SAN 6.0. It basically is a directive to VSAN to start re-balancing components belonging to virtual machine objects around all the hosts and all the disks in...
View ArticleVSAN Design & Sizing – Memory overhead considerations
This week I was in Berlin for our annual Tech Summit in EMEA. This is an event for our field folks in EMEA. I presented a number of VSAN sessions, including a design and sizing session. As part of that...
View Article