vSAN Online Health Check
For a quick video of this feature check out this link.
The Native VSAN health UI was introduced with VSAN 6.1. This was an external plugin that could run a number of basics checks on a cluster. With vSAN 6.2 this feature and functionality became a core art of the product in the form of the Health UI which can be found within the Monitor Tab, under VSAN and Health. Dozens of proactive configuration and state checks are made. The list of checks has expanded in new versions of vSAN to help proactively alert users to potential risks in their environment.
A key limitation is that it requires an update to vSAN and ESXi in order to deploy new health checks. In vSAN 6.6 the Online health check functionality solves this problem. The vSAN online health checks.
These health checks are backed by knowledge base articles so a customer can simply click on the “Ask VMware” button for a link to the corresponding article. It should be noted that this functionality requires the CEIP be enabled on a cluster, and that a vCenter have connectivity to the internet. If direct connectivity is not available it can leverage the vCenter proxy configuration.
Improvements to vSAN Performance Services
In a previous post I mentioned that our long term goal was to replace vSAN observer with the vSAN performance Service. Today is that day. We are deprecating vSAN observer with the launch of vSAN 6.6. It will still be used by GSS in limited cases, but should not be needed for day to day performance visibility.
Improvements to the vSAN user facing graphs performance service have been made. The performance service now has the ability to track physical NIC errors, as well as separate out IO generated by re-sync operations from VM IO actions. This gives increased visibility to the vSAN administrator without the need of addition tools. There are now performance graphs for the iSCSI target service and LUNs. You can now select saved time ranges in performance views. vSAN also saves each selected time range when you run a performance query.
Other improvements have been made to improve GSS’s ability to troubleshoot vSAN cluster performance.
Detailed performance can be exported and uploaded or phoned home through CIEP allowing for troubleshooting without the need for a local instance of vSAN observer. In addition a verbose mode can be enabled that retains addition data if needed. Note these additional traces consume significant data capacity in the performance database, and should only be enabled for a short (1-2 day) period.
For more information in how the performance service can improve supportability see the follow storage hub page.
