Category Archives: 3 Virtual SAN

Upgrading to VMware Virtual SAN 6.0

Virtual SAN 6.0 introduced new changes to the structural components of its architecture. One of those changes is a new on-disk format which delivers better performance and capability enhancements. One of those new capabilities allows vSphere Admins to perform in-place rolling upgrades from Virtual SAN 5.5 to Virtual SAN 6.0 without introducing any application downtime.

Upgrading an existing Virtual SAN 5.5 cluster to Virtual SAN 6.0 is performed in multiple phases and it requires the re-formating of the of all of the magnetic disks that are being used in a Virtual SAN cluster. The upgrade is defined as a one-time procedure that is performed from RVC command line utility with a single command.

Upgrade Phase I: vSphere Infrastructure Upgrade

This phase of the upgrade is all components are upgraded to the vSphere 6.0 release. All vCenter Servers and ESXi hosts and all infrastructure related components need to be upgraded to version their respective and corresponding 6.0 software release. Any of the vSphere supported procedures for the individual components is supported.

Upgrade vCenter Server 5.5 to 6.0 first (Windows or Linux based)
Upgrade ESXi hosts from 5.5 to 6.0 (Interactive, Update Manager, Re-install, Scripted Updates, etc)
Use Maintenance Mode (Ensure accessibility – recommended for reduced times, Full data migration – not recommended unless necessary

Upgrade Phase II: Virtual SAN 6.0 Disk Format Conversion (DFC)

This phase is where the previous on-disk format (VMFS-L) is replaced on all of the magnetic disk devices with the new on-disk format (VSAN FS). The disk format conversion procedures will reformat the disk groups and upgrade all of the objects to the new version 2. Virtual SAN 6.0 provides supports for both the previous on-disk format of Virtual SAN 5.5 (VMFS-L) as well as its new native on-disk format (VSAN FS).

While both on-disk formats are supported, it is highly recommended to upgrade the Virtual SAN cluster to the new on-disk format in order to take advantage of the performance and new available features. The disk format conversion is performed sequentially performed in a Virtual SAN cluster where the upgrade takes place one disk group per host at a time. The workflow illustrated below is repeated for all disk groups on each host before the process moves onto another host that is a member of the cluster.

Continue reading →

VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 Now Generally Available

Virtual SAN 6 – you heard about it in February… thousands of you read about it in Rawlinson’s blog post… and today you can get your hands on it. Virtual SAN 6 is now generally available (GA) – download your evaluation version today! For those of you who missed Rawlinson’s blog post describing the details around what’s new with Virtual SAN 6 – you can read it here (below). But there’s a better way to get the information – register and attend this week’s webinar on “What’s New with Virtual SAN 6” hosted by Rawlinson Rivera – we’ll see you there!

It is with great pleasure and joy that I like to announce the official launch of VMware Virtual SAN 6.0, one of VMware’s most innovative software-defined storage products and the best hypervisor-converged storage platform for virtual machines. Virtual SAN 6.0 delivers a vast variety of enhancements, new features to the as well as performance and scalability improvements.

Virtual SAN 6.0 introduces support for an all-flash architecture specially designed to provide virtualized applications high performance with predictably low latencies. Now with support for both hybrid and all-flash architectures Virtual SAN 6.0 is ready to meet the performance demands of just about any virtualized application by delivering consistent performance with sub-millisecond latencies.

Hybrid Architecture

In the hybrid architecture, server-attached magnetic disks are pooled to create a distributed shared datastore that persists the data. In this type of architecture, you can get up to 40K IOPS per server host.

All-Flash Architecture

In All-Flash architecture, the flash-based caching tier is intelligently used as a write-buffer only while another set of flash devices forms the persistence tier to store data. Since this architecture utilizes only flash devices, it delivers extremely high IOPs of up to 90K per host, with predictable low latencies.

Virtual SAN 6.0 delivers true enterprise-level scale and performance by doubling the scalability of Virtual SAN 5.5 by scaling up to 64 nodes per cluster for both hybrid and all-flash configurations. In addition, Virtual SAN 6.0 improves the number of virtual machines per host up to 200 for both supported architectures.

The performance enhancements delivered in Virtual SAN 6.0 are partially due to the new Virtual SAN on-disk Filesystem (VSAN FS). The new version delivers a new VMDK delta file (vsanSparse) takes advantage of the new on-disk format writing and extended caching capabilities to deliver efficient performance. This results in the delivery of performance-based snapshots, and clone that are comparable to SAN snapshots.

Virtual SAN 6.0 now enables intelligent placement of virtual machine objects across server racks for enhanced application availability even in case of complete rack failures. Virtual SAN Fault Domains provide the ability to group multiple hosts within a cluster to define failure domains to ensure replicas of virtual machines data is spread across the defined failure domains (racks).

Along with all the new added features a significant amount of improvements have been added to enhance the management user experience:

Disk/Disk Group Evacuation – Introduce ability to evacuate data from individual disk/disk groups before removing a disk/disk group from the Virtual SAN.
Disk Serviceability features – easily map the location of magnetic disks and flash devices. Ability light disk LED on failures, Turn disk LED on/off from the vSphere Web Client.
Storage Consumption Models – adds functionality to visualize Virtual SAN 6.0 datastore resource utilization when a VM Storage Policy is created or edited.
UI Resynchronization Dashboard – the vSphere Web Client UI displays virtual machine objects resynchronization status and remaining bytes to sync.
Proactive Rebalance – provides the ability to manually trigger a rebalance operation in order to utilize newly added cluster storage capacity.
Health Services – deliver troubleshooting and health reports to vSphere Administrators about Virtual SAN 6.0 subsystems and their dependencies such as cluster, network, data, limits, physical disk.

With all the major enhancements and features of this release, Virtual SAN is now enterprise-ready, and customers can use it for a broad range of use cases, including business-critical and tier-1 production applications. Stay tune, there is a lot more to come from the world’s greatest software-defined storage platform. For more information visit the Virtual SAN product page.

– Enjoy

For future updates on Virtual SAN (VSAN), vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) and other Software-defined Storage technologies as well as vSphere + OpenStack be sure to follow me on Twitter: @PunchingClouds

Be sure to subscribe to the Virtual SAN blog or follow our social channels at @vmwarevsan and Facebook.com/vmwarevsan for the latest updates.

For more information about VMware Virtual SAN, visit http://www.vmware.com/products/virtual-san.

VMware Virtual SAN Alarms for vCenter Server with PowerCLI

I was recently involved in a couple customer conversations where the main topics were focused on monitoring and troubleshooting events in vCenter particularly for Virtual SAN.

I know that particular topic has been covered a few times in the past, not only on the VMware corporate storage blog but also by other community blogs. To be more specific, one of the VSAN Champions William Lam has covered this topic extensively on his personal blog.

The work that we have done on the topic of vCenter Server Alarms and Virtual SAN stems from the findings identified in two articles published by William. For more information on what are the recommended vCenter Server Alarms for Virtual SAN and how to add and configure them take a look at the articles listed below:

With vSphere 6.0 and Virtual SAN 6.0 nearing generally available very soon, this script can make things a lot easier for all Virtual SAN customers and provide a simplified way to get all the available vCenter Server alarms for Virtual SAN added and configured within seconds.

I got a chance to work on this little nugget with one of the world’s baddest PowerCLI gurus on the planet and also another VSAN Champion Alan Renouf and William Lam as well whom are members of the VMware virtualization team codename #TheWreckingCrew. Here is a PowerCLI sample code that can be utilized to add and configure all of the vCenter Server Alarms for Virtual SAN. These alarms are applicable to both Virtual SAN versions 5.5 as well as 6.0. Continue reading →

VMware Virtual SAN 6.0: Bootstorm Demonstration

Since the official announcement of VMware Virtual SAN All-Flash architecture, most of the conversations have been focused about the solutions incredible performance capabilities and attributes with regards to IOPS, predictable performance, sub-millisecond latencies. All of those attributes are great and part of the reason as to why Virtual SAN 6.0 as a storage platform and its use cases have been expanded to also focus on business critical applications and large enterprise environments.

I want to turn the spotlight onto one of the many supported use cases for Virtual SAN 6.0 and highlight one of the invaluable capabilities of the new platform with regards to Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI).

Some of the functional requirements for large enterprise infrastructure designs for VDI include the characterization of boot, refresh, and provision times for standard operations and worst case scenarios.

I have seen a fair share of VDI designs and demonstrations of different platforms showcasing bootstorms, refresh and rebuilds times they all do a pretty good job. Now with that said I wanted to take the opportunity to showcase the powerful capabilities of the Virtual SAN 6.0 by demonstrating a bootstorm at the maximum supported capabilities of the platform. This bootstorm demonstration consists of 6401 desktops on a Virtual SAN 6.0 All-Flash 64 node cluster (BigDaddy).
The key and impressive items showcased as part of the demonstration are the following:

BigDaddy – 64 Node All-Flash Virtual SAN Cluster
Desktops – booting all 6401 desktops in the cluster at once (in batches of 1024 at a time)
Boot Time – 24 minutes booting all desktops plus allocation of IP address about 19 minutes for a total of about 40 minutes

This demonstration does not contain tampered or custom configurations of any of the Virtual SAN settings. This is what we generally call an Out-of-the-Box experience. Another important thing to point out here is my definition for completed boot time. What I mean by complete boot, is not just when the desktop is powered on, but when all the desktops have successfully acquired an IP address and are really up and running and ready to be use.

In the interest of time, the demonstration has been sped up from its original length of time to about 5 minutes. Feel free to pay attention to the timestamp as it is displayed in the command line interface to validate the accuracy of the booting time.

This demonstration successfully highlights the one of the many powerful capabilities of available in VMware Virtual SAN 6.0.

– Enjoy

VMware Virtual SAN: All-Flash Configuration

The cat is officially out of the bag, as they say!. Everyone in the world should now be aware of the fact that VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 supports an all-flash architecture. I think it’s time to discuss a couple of items with regards to a new architecture.

The Virtual SAN 6.0 All-Flash architecture uses flash-based devices for both caching and persistent storage. In this architecture, the flash cache is used completely as write buffer. This all-flash architecture introduces a two-tier model of flash devices:

write-intensive, high endurance caching tier for the writes
read-intensive, cost-effective flash device tier for data persistence

The new device tiering model not only deliver incredible performance results, but it can also potentially introduce cost savings for the Virtual SAN 6.0 all-flash architecture depending on the design and hardware configuration of the solution.

Virtual SAN Configuration Requirements

In order to configure Virtual SAN 6.0 for the all-flash architecture, the flash devices need to be appropriately identified within the system. In Virtual SAN, flash devices are identified and categorized for the caching tier by default. In order to successfully enabled the all-flash architecture configuration we need manually to flag the flash devices that will be utilized for data persistence or capacity. This configuration is performed via one of the supported command line interface tools such as RVC or ESXCLI.

RVC handles the configuration of the devices at a cluster level. Below you’ll find an image, which illustrates the usable syntax for flagging the flash devices with RVC.

ESXCLI handles it at the per-host level. Below you’ll find an image, which illustrates the usable syntax for flagging the flash devices with esxcli.

Another command line utility that is worth knowing is the VSAN Disk Query (vdq). This utility allows users to identify when the flash devices are configured for used in the capacity tier as well as if they are eligible to be use by Virtual SAN.
Whenever vdq is used to query the flash devices on a host as illustrated below, the output will display a new property called “IsCapacityFlash”. This property specifies whether a flash device will be utilized for the capacity tier instead of the caching tier.

For more in-depth information on the use of vdq, please take a look at a post by one of VMware’s elite engineers and VSAN Champion William Lam.

It’s important to highlight that flagging flash devices to be used for capacity cannot be performed from the option available in the vSphere Web Client UI. It has to be performed via the CLI. (wait for it….wait for it)

Once the flash devices, they will be displayed as magnetic devices (HDD) in the disk management section of the Virtual SAN management tab.

That’s about it, after the flash devices have been properly tagged, the rest of the Virtual SAN configuration procedure is as easy as it was in the previous version.

So in the spirit of making things easy and reduce any contention with getting into the CLI and manually flagging every disk. I’ve been able to design a tool along with my good pal and now a VSAN Champion Brian Graf that should take care of disk tagging process for just about everyone.

Here is a demo of how simple it is to configure a Virtual SAN 6.0 all-flash cluster with a teaser of the Virtual SAN All-Flash Configuration Utility. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention….. It’s a 64 node all-flash cluster (The BigDaddy).

– Enjoy

VMware’s 64-node All-Flash VSAN demo at PEX

Another productive VMware Partner Exchange day for our partners and we had another great turnout at the Software-Defined Storage (SDS) Pavilion, where we demoed VDI boot storm on VMware’s 64-node All-Flash VSAN and we continue to have multiple ecosystem partners showcasing their joint solutions with Virtual SAN and Virtual Volumes.

If you missed it, on Monday Feb 2^nd VMware launched VMware Virtual SAN 6 – the best storage platform for virtual machines, including business critical applications. Radically simple, VMware Virtual SAN 6 introduces 2x more scalability (yes 64 nodes!) and up to 4.5x greater performance (that’s 90k IOPs per host!) while adding several new enterprise-class data services capabilities. Continue reading →

The Software-Defined Storage Pavilion is open!

SDS Pavilion at PEX 2015

PEX 2015 is off to a great start, and in case you missed it Software-Defined Storage (SDS) is key component of what VMware wants to show the partner community this year. We announced VMware Virtual SAN 6, the next generation of the radically simple hypervisor-converged storage software, and vSphere Virtual Volumes, a new integration framework to enable VM-aware storage.

To help partners navigate everything there is to know about these technologies, we created the first ever Software-Defined Storage Pavilion. The SDS Pavilion brings together the vast ecosystem of storage technology partners that deliver certified solutions for both Virtual SAN and Virtual Volumes.

The Pavilion opens today at 11:30 and it is located on the 2nd floor of Moscone West. 10 showcase partners will be present all day: Cisco, Dell, HP, HDS, IBM, Micron & Supermicro, NetApp, Nexenta, SanDisk and Tintri. We also have a lineup of experts rotating at the Expert Bar and Demo stations.

If you are interested in hearing from Partners, at 11:30 SoftNAS will show NFS & CIFS Storage for Virtual SAN 6, at 12:30 Atlantis computing will show a Virtual Volumes demo and at 1:30 SolidFire will follow on that same topic.

And if you want to engage with VMware experts, we have Christos Karamanolis, Principal Engineer for Virtual SAN at 2:00, Jack Lo, VP for Storage & Availability at VMware at 5:00 and the entire Virtual SAN engineering team on site throughout the day.

So, stop by and learn about VMware Software-Defined Storage! Follow the conversation via #PEXsds #VMwarePEX

Announcing the VMware Software-Defined Storage Pavilion at PEX 2015

SDS Pavilion Showcase Partners for VSAN & VVOLs

VMware SDS Pavilion Showcase Partners @ PEX 2015

Following the exciting launch of VMware Virtual SAN 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes, PEX 2015 will host the first Software-Defined Storage (SDS) Pavilion to showcase solutions by the partners in the SDS ecosystem. The SDS Pavilion is located on the 2nd floor of Moscone West. This week, Tuesday to Thursday, the SDS Pavilion will be featuring guest exec speakers, live demos, expert bar Q&A, coffee chats and more for PEX attendees.

We invite you to stop by to visit with our 10 SDS showcase partners and daily guest experts as well as follow the conversation via #PEXsds #VMwarePEX to learn more about delivery of the Software-Defined Storage vision through VMware Virtual SAN 6, VMware’s hyper-converged storage software, and vSphere Volumes which enables deeper levels of integration between vSphere and storage arrays extending SDS policy automation to VMware’s ecosystem.

VMware Virtual SAN 6.0

Continue reading →

vRealize Operations Management Pack for Virtual SAN Beta – Early Sign-up

If you already heard the exciting news about VMware new offerings – vSphere 6, Virtual SAN 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes – and thought it can’t get any better, we have a small surprise for you. Virtual SAN 6.0 includes a host of new features including high performance snapshots and clones, all flash Virtual SAN with intelligent 2-tier model, failure domains and more. One of the most requested features among Virtual SAN 5.5 customers is enabling greater visibility to what happens “under the hood”. The Virtual SAN team developed a new health dashboard that will help customers tackle underlying hardware issues as part of the v6.0 release, but in addition to that the vRealize operations team developed an advanced set of dashboards aimed at making Virtual SAN users life much easier.

The Virtual SAN team along with the vRealize Operations team are thrilled to offer you a unique opportunity to beta test the new vRealize Operations Management Pack for Storage Devices. The management pack will feature advanced insight into Virtual SAN through advanced analytics to enable rapid troubleshooting and cluster optimization.

We will share more details closer to the start of the beta program which will kick off in Q1 2015. If you would like to get more information and be on the list of people who get an invitation to participate in the beta, please sign up here – www.vmware.com/go/vrops4vsan-beta

Check out the vROps MPSD blog post for more details – http://blogs.vmware.com/management/2015/02/vsan-simplifying-sddc-storage-operations-with-vrealize-operations-management-pack-for-storage-devices.html