John Nicholson

Recent Posts

Adaptive Resync in vSAN 6.7

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A key goal of vSAN is to deliver a reliable and consistent computing environment. One challenge to any storage system is making sure that when a device fails that the environment is brought back to full protection levels quickly. vSAN has some unique capabilities in that all free space is treated as “hot spare” capacity Read more...

What’s New with VMware vSAN 6.7

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Introducing vSAN 6.7 vSAN 6.7 is here! This release offers features and capabilities that enable improved performance, usability and consistency. Significant improvements to the management and monitoring tools are also matched by lower level performance and application consistency improvements. vSAN continues to see rapid adoption with more than 10,000 customers and growing. A 600 Million Read more...

vSAN Capacity View

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vSAN Capacity Views were introduced in 6.2 and provide insight into how capacity is being used. From the Cluster select —> Monitor —> vSAN —> Capacity to see the capacity views. From here you will find several panels of information related to the capacity.     First off is the Capacity Overview. This will show Read more...

vSAN Support Insight

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  Historically most interactions with vendor support begin with a predictable script. If the explanation does not arrive at a quick resolution, logs must be collected, uploaded, and reviewed. This process is a balance between speed (immediate triage based on what can be conveyed in an email or phone call) vs. precision of resolution (a Read more...

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...