John Nicholson

Recent Posts

Top Tips for moving data to vSAN! (Part 1) – First steps

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While it is easy to create new virtual machines on a new vSAN powered vSphere cluster, sometimes the process of identifying the best way to migrate existing workloads over can seem a bit confusing. What workloads do you move first? What is the best Migration method? What about Physical machines? The purpose of this blog Read more...
vSphere 7 U1 Data Protection

What’s new in vSphere 7 U1 (For Data Protection)

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With the release of vSphere 7 Update 1, a number of improvements have come to backing up virtual machines. VMware’s powerful APIs allow for fast, efficient backup and restore operations of virtual machines. Network QoS for Backup Traffic A new dedicated resource pool is been introduced for backup network traffic.  System administrators can set this Read more...
iSCSI on vSAN

vSAN 7 Update 1 – iSCSI now supports vSAN Stretched Clusters!

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Previously iSCSI on vSAN was not supported. Why was this? Normally vSAN Stretched clusters implement a site locality construct to avoid unnecessary inter-site latency being added to the read IO path (They prefer all reads from the local site). The challenge came from the fact that the iSCSI service had no awareness of the two Read more...
Thin Blocks, vSAN HCI Economics

Thick vs. Thin on vSAN and VMFS – 2020 Edition

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Should you use Eager Zero Thick? For VMFS, maybe? but for vSAN probably not. Ok, I’ll agree I probably owe an explanation of why. A quick history lesson of the 3 kinds of VMDKs used on VMFS. thin: Space is not guaranteed, it’s consumed as the disk is written to. thick (Sometimes called Lazy Thick): Read more...
vSAN Product Icon

How to Generate an Email Alert for vSAN Drive Failure

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There are multiple ways to generate email alerts, from VMware vSAN. vRealize Operations at scale is a powerful tool that allows multicluster and Datacenter to roll up, LogInsight can generate email alerts, SNMP based alerts, and use webhooks to push alerts into several other operational tools. Also, 3rd party tools from server vendors can monitor Read more...
vSAN Compression Only feature example

HCI Economics – Upgrade vSAN to Save Money

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Upgrade Economics Patching and upgrading in a data center is something that is sometimes viewed purely as a “cost” based on the manpower required to upgrade an environment. While VMware has a lot of great options to reduce this (VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud, vSphere Lifecycle Manager), it is worth noting that by upgrading you Read more...
VMware vSAN HCI Mesh

Introducing VMware vSAN HCI Mesh

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VMware vSAN HCI Mesh   The Scale out architecture of VMware vSAN enables powerful non-disruptive scale-up or scale-out capabilities. You can non-disruptively expand capacity and performance by adding hosts to a cluster (scale-out) or just grow capacity by adding disks to a host (scale-up). As application workloads organically grow, this enables performance to be right Read more...
vsan 7 vsan file services

Top-3 New Features in vSAN 7: #2 – vSAN File Services

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Setting up vSAN File Services vSAN File Services adds a critical service to VMware Cloud Foundation. Layering a distributed protocol access layer on top of vSAN’s existing shared nothing distributed object store. Simplify operations and remove complexity by integrating File workloads into the infrastructure itself. For more information on how to use this with Kubernetes Read more...

What is the Maximum vSAN VMDK Size?

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How big should my VMDKs be on vSAN? I recently was asked about VMDK size best practices with vSAN. The maximum supported VMDK size is 62TB. Much like discussions around the largest size for a vSAN or vSphere cluster (Check out this post!), this is very much a nuanced operational discussion with a lot of Read more...