VSAN


A little while ago I replaced my three ageing Intel NUC hosts with a single (still ageing) Dell T7500 workstation. The workstation provides 24 processor cores and 96GB RAM for a really reasonable price, while still being quiet enough to sit in my home office. One of the driving factors in retiring the old NUCs was vSAN - I know in the newer generations of NUC you can get an M2 and a SATA SSD in, but my 1st gen.

Sunday Arriving in early on Sunday as the local flight choices are more limited from Bristol than perhaps a larger Airport, very fortunate to have a hotel so close to the VMworld venue, perhaps not so great for the evening activities but I am happy with it this way around.
Other than registration (4pm-8pm) and hopefully catching up with a few folk who have also arrived early.
In the evening I had the pleasure to meet many awesome people from the vCommunity.


Published under vRealize Operations and vSAN
I have recently been able to get vSAN properly up and running in my lab and took a look at the OOTB Dashboards that come with the MPSD (Management Pack for Storage Devices).
As I have a hybrid build (I know many have All Flash Arrays) I was interested in how hard my Flash Cache was working so I built a dashboard purely focused on this aspect of the vSAN product.

My vSphere lab is split into two halves - a low power management cluster, powered by 3 Intel NUCs, and a more hefty workload cluster powered by a Dell C6100 chassis with 3 nodes. The workload servers are noisy and power hungry so they tend to be powered off when I am not using them, and since they live in my garage, I power them on and off remotely.
To automate the process, I wanted to write an Orchestrator workflow (vRO sits on my management cluster and is therefore always on) that could safely and robustly shut down the workload cluster.

I ran into a strange one with my lab today where the previously working VSAN cluster couldn’t be enabled. Symptoms included:
The button to enable VSAN was missing from vSphere Web Client vsphere_client_virgo.log had the following error: [2016-09-16T14:49:03.473Z] [ERROR] http-bio-9090-exec-18 70001918 100023 200008 com.vmware.vise.data.query.impl.DataServiceImpl Error occurred while executing query:
QuerySpec
QueryName: dam-auto-generated: ConfigureVsanActionResolver:dr-57
ResourceSpec
Constraint: ObjectIdentityConstraint
TargetType: ClusterComputeResource

Published under VMware
I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my lab page.

I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my lab page.

Published under VMware
*This post was meant to be published on Friday, VMworld Sleep Deprivation meant I didn’t click the button!*
This is the last post and a bit of a wrap up on my VMworld 2014 series!
There isn’t a keynote on day three, and there’s definitely a “winding down” feel as people tend to arrive later (if at all) and many are…feeling the effects of the previous night shall we say! That said, every session I wanted to attend was still fully booked and it was a case of queuing for the spare seats.