John Nicholson

Recent Posts

vCenter Recoverability Improvements

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In vSAN 6.6 vSAN switched from using Multicast to Unicast for new node discovery. This was a huge improvement that improved scalability, simplified deployment and troubleshooting. This drastically simplified layer 3 and stretched cluster deployment as well as reduced configuration times in new clusters being deployed.  While upgrading hosts will operate with Unicast between 6.5 Read more...

vSAN Performance Diagnostics

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I am excited to announce that launch of vSAN Performance diagnostics. This feature will enable faster performance troubleshooting and when burning in a cluster with performance tests to understand how you can increase the IOPS or lower the storage latency and what is your bottleneck within the host. Performance diagnostics analyzes previously executed benchmarks. It Read more...

Goodbye Multicast

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vSAN I’ll start off with a simple statement that will likely make a lot of customers happy. VMware vSAN in 6.6 will no longer use Multicast. All vSAN traffic will instead use Unicast. For a history of why Multicast was used, as well as what changed to prompt the shift read the history of vSAN multicast on Read more...

Designing vSAN Networks – Dedicated or Shared Interfaces?

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Every week my top vSAN questions tend to concentrate around networking design. A lot of questions center on if it is ok to share physical interfaces for multiple purposes. Do I need dedicated interfaces for vSAN? In talking to customers a little more than half choose to put other traffic classes (Virtual machine, Management, vMotion etc) on Read more...

Designing vSAN Networks – Using Multiple Interfaces?

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vSAN can leverage a number of core ESXi networking features to increase performance and availability.  vSAN VMkernel ports should always be configured to use more than one interface to preserve availability in the event of a link failure. There are a number of ways to configure this fail over. Which will you choose? While there Read more...

Licensing Applications on vSAN?

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I wanted to highlight that a lot of questions come up asking about how to control licensing Oracle and other business critical applications on vSAN. Thankfully there are tools in vSphere to enforce and monitor licensing complaince on vSAN clusters. There is no need for storage only nodes, isolated vCenters, isolated clusters, to keep licensing costs Read more...

vSAN stripes (How, When and Why?)

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Number of Disk Stripes Per Object/Stripe Width Number Of Disk Stripes Per Object, commonly referred to as stripe width, is the setting that defines the minimum number of capacity devices across which each replica of a storage object is distributed. vSAN may actually create more stripes than the number specified in the policy for reasons Read more...