This morning the second general session of VMworld was given at Moscone North. It basically covered the same topics as yesterday, but with some extra sauce and flavours. Read on to find out what announcements were made.
VSAN
VMworld 2014: No Limits
As the ticker on my blog indicates, in less then 4 weeks VMworld will be the center of attention in San Francisco! Whether you are new to VMworld or have been here before, there are always new things to discover, new people to meet and of course an amazing experience to be there!
VMware and HP Software-Defined Enterprise Roadshow
Today the enterprise roadshow by VMware and HP was held at Park Plaza Airport in Lijnden, the Netherlands. This post sums up the highlights of this day.
VMware releases vSphere 5.5 U1
Yesterday, VMware released vSphere 5.5 U1 and includes many improvements, but also the production-ready version of VMware VSAN.
VMware NOW: VSAN General Availability
VMware announced a VMware NOW online event on the 6th of March about the general availability of VMware VSAN. Be sure to register and hear about VSAN GA features and hopefully the release date!
Removing a VMware host from a VSAN cluster without putting it into maintenance mode
This post explains the steps you could take to remove a VSAN-enabled host from a VSAN cluster without putting it into maintenance mode. You could also use this method to remove an VSAN-less ESXi host from a cluster without putting it into maintenance mode.
Transforming from baremetal VMware vSphere to nested VSAN: Part Two (Preparation and Execution)
Welcome to part two of my VSAN ‘trilogy’! If you’ve missed the first part, see the link below.
Transforming from baremetal VMware vSphere to nested VSAN: Part One (Design)
This post contains the steps I’ve taken to prepare my transformation from a traditional vSphere lab environment to a VSAN-powered environment.
Transforming from baremetal VMware vSphere to nested VSAN: Part One (Design)
Alot has been going on in my head about how I should transform my homelab from a simple physical box with just plain vSphere 5.5 on it and memory consuming applications like Microsoft Exchange and Lync to a nested ESXi environment where I can test new VMware features and technologies apposed to the Microsoft technologies I have seen for many years now.
VMware #VSAN Beta available for download!
Today VMware announced that the VSAN Beta is available for download.
Get your copy at the following URL:
https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/get-download?downloadGroup=VSPHERE2013_VSANPUBLICBETA
Check out my other posts to see what VSAN does. Basically it transforms your local storage to a replicated form of storage, delivering low latency and high performance next to high availability.
For more information check out the VSAN Beta Program Community:
https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/vsan
Related articles
- VMworld 2013: VMware Virtual SAN #STO5391 (snowvm.com)
VMworld 2013: VMware Virtual SAN #STO5391
Before going into detail about this session, I must say that the speakers were hard to understand due to bad English pronouncement. It would be good if the speakers would train this so that everybody can understand what they are saying.
This session, primarily presented by Christos Karamanolis was all about VSAN, or Virtual SAN, the new feature available from vSphere 5.5.
In my opinion, VSAN is a replacement for the Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) released during vSphere 5.0. And, VSAN could compete with the solution offered by Nutanix, except the intelligent software that Nutanix has developed will be more enhanced compared to VSAN.
For people not familiar with VSA; this solution will transform the local storage in your ESXi host to a VSA datastore. With a minimum of 2, maximum of 3 ESXi hosts, you can create a VSA cluster. Hosts in this cluster will replicate their VSA datastore with adjacent ESXi hosts and provide high availability (and stable performance, since it’s local storage!). You can run the VSA datastore next to your other datastore and will be able to storage vMotion between datastore types.
VSAN is enabled on ESXi cluster-level and will by default initialize all unused space on the hosts in this cluster. Advanced configuration enables an administrator to only use a specific amount or type of storage capacity. You don’t need to deploy extra VMs or vApps to use VSAN. It’s all inside vSphere 5.5.
Hardware-based (or software) RAID will not be used, but replication will be used instead. For each VM it’s possible to define how many replicas will be available using storage profiles in vSphere. This way you can protect important VMs using more replicas and provide a simple protection for the less important VMs.
Replication will keep copies of the VMDK blocks among all ESXi hosts in the VSAN-enabled cluster and removes the need for a RAID configuration. The local initialized storage (SATA, SAS or SSD drives) will be added to one big datastore presented by VSAN. This datastore will grow in size as you add extra drives. You don’t need to keep all your hosts the same, you can add extra SSD or HDD drives to specific hosts to add extra capacity of a certain drive type. The same goes for compute, but you need to have a minimum of 1 HDD and 1 SSD drive in a host to enable VSAN. A minimum of 3 vSphere ESXi 5.5 hosts are required to enable VSAN at cluster level.
The ESXi hosts need to have a 1GB or 10GB NIC and need to have VSAN virtual networks configured in order for VSAN to be enabled and be operational. When you have a RAID controller in your host, configure it as JBOD. As stated earlier, you should not configure RAID protection in combination with VSAN.
The vSphere hosts need to be on the VMware HCL to be supported for VSAN use. Of course all of your hardware is listed on the HCL.. Right? 🙂
When using replicas, write I/O will go to all replicas for that specific VM. Read I/O will go to any replica. This way of I/O pathing will provide high performance and high availability.
One last thing I would like to mention is that VSAN provides a detailed performance view which can be used for capacity management and troubleshooting.
- Performance analysis tools provided by VSAN
When vSphere 5.5 is available for download I will most certainly test out the VSAN functionality and see if it can indeed replace the VSA functionality.