This is because the local drives on a host that is in maintenance mode do not contribute to vSAN datastore capacity until the host exits maintenance mode. This recommendation is not exclusive to vSAN. Most other HCI storage solutions follow similar recommendations to allow for fluctuations in capacity utilization without disruption. Starting with vSAN 7 U1, there has been significant improvements to reduce the reserve capacity requirements to handle host failures and internal operations.
When the threshold is reached a health alert is triggered and no further provisioning is allowed. This enhancement greatly helps administrators manage capacity efficiently. Alternatively, this can also be monitored through vsantop.
A host with no local storage can be added to a vSAN cluster. Recommendation : Use uniformly configured hosts for vSAN deployments. While compute only hosts can exist in a vSAN environment, and consume storage from other hosts in the cluster, VMware supports vSAN clusters with asymmetrical host configurations, VMware does not recommend having unbalanced cluster configurations, and thus minimize significant levels of asymmetry.
This will help prevent potential availability and capacity issues during failure conditions, and minimize deviation in performance. This enables administrators to deploy vCenter Server to a new environment where vSAN will be the only datastore. This deployment option is typically referred to as "Easy Install". In addition, Cluster Quickstart provides a simplified workflow to configure and add hosts to an existing cluster.
Consistent hardware and software configurations across all hosts in a vSAN cluster are recommended. Recommendation : Implement consistent hardware and software configurations across all hosts in a vSAN cluster to ensure proper and consistent operation, and effective lifecycle management using vLCM.
HCI Mesh can be an effective way to borrow storage resources from one homogeneous cluster to another. An asymmetrical cluster makes operational considerations and vSAN data placement decisions much more complex than necessary and is the reason why VMware recommends a relatively symmetrical configuration of storage, memory, network, and compute resources across all hosts in a cluster.
Asymmetry is a more prominent concern with smaller cluster sizes, and clusters with severe levels of asymmetry because one host could represent a much larger amount of capacity than another. It can also lead to an imbalance of performance demands across the cluster.
An object consists of one or more components. The size and number of components depend on several factors such as the size of the object and the storage policy assigned.
The following figure shows common virtual machine objects. Each object commonly consists of multiple components. Components are just an implementation detail, and not a manageable entity in vSAN. The image below provides details on the number of components and the hosts where they are located. As a result, two components are created - two copies of the virtual disk - and there is a witness component that is used to achieve quorum if one of the other components is offline or there is a split-brain scenario.
Note : The witness component should not be confused with the witness host virtual appliance discussed earlier in this document as they are two different items. This helps avoid reads across the network and further improves performance considering the speed of reading from memory is exponentially faster than reading from persistent storage devices.
As discussed in the previous question, the storage objects belonging to a VM are not migrated with the VM. Therefore, data in the cache tier is not lost and does not need re-warmed. The use of hardware not listed in the VCG can lead to undesirable results.
The following articles provide additional detail on this topic. Using a device such as an SSD, M. Storage Controller firmware health check helps identify and validate the firmware release against the recommended versions. The firmware on storage controllers can be managed with vSphere Lifecycle Manager vLCM , which will automatically determine the correct firmware and driver combination with respect to the version of vSphere and vSAN that is installed.
It depends on which components we are referring to. For disk drives, there is a minimum version for each family and as long as it is higher than what is listed in that family, we support it. This is decided and updated after discussion with the OEM partner.
These devices can offer extraordinary levels of performance to a vSAN environment. Yes, VMware is partnered with the industry-leading cloud providers that offer services based on VMware Cloud Foundation. This offers customers to build a hybrid cloud using public and private assets using a common substrate of management and tools for consistent infrastructure operations.
The minute timer is in place to avoid unnecessary movement of large amounts of data. As an example, a reboot takes the host offline for approximately 10 minutes. It would be inefficient and resource-intensive to begin rebuilding several gigabytes or terabytes of data when the host is offline briefly. This helps improve durability of data in both planned, and unplanned events. The VMs that were running on a failed host are rebooted on other healthy hosts in the cluster in a matter of minutes.
This is a feature that when paired with a OEM server vendor plugin, will proactively evacuate the VMs and the vSAN data off of a host that it detects impending failure. This can help improve availability, but also prescribed levels of resilience assigned to that data via storage policies.
As an example, a VM has a virtual disk with a data component on Host1, a second mirrored data component on Host2, and a witness component on Host 3. Host1 is isolated from Host2 and Host3.
Host2 and Host3 are still connected over the network. This helps ensure data integrity. Recommendation : Build your vSAN network with the same level of resilience as any other storage fabric. Dual switches connected via some type of interconnect such as a LAG, with all hosts using multiple NIC uplinks, and vSwitches configured as such.
VMs are protected by storage policies that include failure tolerance levels. This means the VMs with this policy assigned can withstand the failure of a disk or an entire host without data loss.
When a device is degraded and error codes are sensed by vSAN, all of the vSAN components on the affected drive are marked degraded and the rebuilding process starts immediately to restore redundancy. If the device fails without warning no error codes received from the device , vSAN will wait for 60 minutes by default and then rebuild the affected data on other disks in the cluster. As an example, a disk is inadvertently pulled from the server chassis and reseated approximately 10 minutes later.
It would be inefficient and resource-intensive to begin rebuilding several gigabytes of data when the disk is offline briefly. When the failure of a device is anticipated due to multiple sustained periods of high latency, vSAN evaluates the data on the device. This does not affect the availability of a VM as the data is still accessible using one or more other replicas in the cluster. If the only replica of data is located on a suspect device, vSAN will immediately start the evacuation of this data to other healthy storage devices.
Note : The failure of a cache tier device will cause the entire disk group to go offline. Another similar scenario is a cluster with deduplication and compression enabled. The failure of any disk cache or capacity will cause the entire disk group to go offline due to the way deduplicated data is distributed across disks. Recommendation : Consider the number and size of disk groups in your cluster with deduplication and compression enabled.
While larger disk groups might improve deduplication efficiency, this also increases the impact on the cluster when a disk fails. Requirements for each organization are different so there is no set rule for disk group sizing. In cases where there are not enough resources online to comply with all storage policies, vSAN will repair as many objects as possible. This helps ensure the highest possible levels of redundancy in environments affected by the unplanned downtime.
When additional resources come back online, vSAN will continue the repair process to comply with storage policies. Recommendation : Maintain enough reserve capacity for rebuild operations and other activities such as storage policy changes, VM snapshots, and so on.
Some vSAN objects will become inaccessible if the number of failures in a cluster exceeds the failures to tolerate FTT setting in the storage policy assigned to these objects. This means there are two copies of the object with each copy on a separate host. If both hosts that contain these two copies are temporarily offline at the same time two failures , that exceeds the number of failures to tolerate in the assigned storage policy.
The object will not be accessible until at least one of the hosts is back online. A more catastrophic failure, such as the permanent loss of both hosts, requires a restore from backup media. As with any storage platform, it is always best to have backup data on a platform that is separate from your primary storage.
Secondary levels of resilience, offered in Stretched cluster topologies, and 2-node topologies as of vSAN 7 U3 can improve the levels of availability during multiple failure scenarios. Many third-party data protection products use VMware vSphere Storage APIs - Data Protection to provide efficient, reliable backup and recovery for virtualized environments.
Nearly all of these solutions should work with vSAN. It is important to obtain a support statement for vSAN from the data protection product vendor you use. Best practices and implementation recommendations vary by vendor.
Consult with your data protection product vendor for optimal results. Recommendation : Verify your data protection vendor supports the use of their product with vSAN.
Subsequently, the operations are resumed when sufficient capacity is made available. However, vCenter does not affect the data plane i. VMs continue to run, and application availability is not impacted. Management features such as changing a storage policy, monitoring performance, and adding a disk group are not available.
Hosts in a vSAN cluster cooperate in a distributed fashion to check the health of the entire cluster. Any host in the cluster can be used to view vSAN Health.
This provides redundancy for the vSAN Health data to help ensure administrators always have this information available. In a stretched cluster configuration, data can be mirrored across sites for redundancy. Additionally, a secondary level of resilience can be assigned to data that resides within each site.
Assigning a site level protection and a secondary level of protection is all achieved in a single storage policy. Site Recovery Manager is integrated with vSphere Replication. Refer VMware Product Interoperability matrices for version-specific interoperability details.
The benefit of using VCHA over a single vCenter VM with vSphere HA to automate the restart is in the order of a minute or two in startup time - as such, it should be considered that if the extra startup time is acceptable, use vSphere HA and a single vCenter VM for operational simplicity. While vSAN strives for durability under the harshest of environments, a data center design that uses redundant power or standby temporary power is always encouraged.
The storage consumed by such apps could be ephemeral or persistent, but in most cases, it is required to be persistent. Yes, With the release of vSAN 6. Kubernetes administrators can simply associate "storage classes" of the respective containers to Storage Policies. Traditional applications rely on the feature-set of an enterprise storage system and hypervisor to provide data and application availability and resilience.
Stateful applications are built differently. They often use a shared-nothing architecture SNA , are typically responsible for their own levels of data and application availability and resilience and have the mechanisms in place to do so. The vSAN DPp provides an ability for these apps to maintain these responsibilities while ensuring that it can coordinate with the underlying hypervisor and distributed storage system vSAN for events such as maintenance, failures, and expansion.
In this context, an operator is a small piece of software that provides application control. This provides and interface for bidirectional communication with the underlying platform: VMware vSAN. The 3rd party operators used by DPp will be enabled and updated by the vSphere Administrator, and done so on an as-needed basis. In versions up to and including vSAN 7 U2, the operators are integrated into the installation, eliminating the need to download operators.
With vSAN 7 U3, the installation process is asynchronous, meaning that the operators are not bundled with the installation of vCenter, and can be installed and updated to the latest edition at any time by the administrator.
They can also provide the features associated with a traditional vSAN datastore if those capabilities are not provided by the shared nothing application. Clusters providing storage courtesy of the vSAN Direct Configuration can only be used for applications with approved operators and are subject to additional restrictions on hardware devices used. Clusters using vSAN Direct Configuration can offer supreme levels of efficiency for shared-nothing applications and can offer anti-affinity of data across devices on a given host.
Only those applications with their own 3rd party operator are eligible to use storage courtesy of vSAN Direct Configuration. How does file service work with vSAN? These containers act as the primary delivery vehicle to provision file services and are tightly integrated with the hypervisor. For a standard vSAN cluster, a minimum of 3 hosts is required to configure file services. It will run with as many as 2 remaining hosts.
By default, there are no reservations applied to the resource pool associated with the entities required for vSAN File Service. A new health check called "The File Service - Infrastructure health" monitors several parameters and includes an automated remediation option.
No, however, if the DRS feature is available, it will create a resource group. If the DRS license feature is missing, it will not create a resource group. The full capabilities of the snapshot mechanism are accessible via API. Using file share snapshots as a backup source requires backup products supporting the functionality. Backup vendors are currently working to provide support for vSAN file shares.
Until then, organizations can use PowerCLI and backup vendor PowerShell modules to add newly created snapshots as a backup source. The containers are automatically shutdown and removed. It will be recreated once an available host is no longer in maintenance mode. Yes, vSAN File Services can be used to provision file shares to container workloads as well as traditional workloads.
Services within vSphere monitor for failure or maintenance activities and drive the relocation of services. While by default you will have up to 1 container per host, additional containers will run on a host in a case where a host or hosts have failed. When a host enters maintenance mode the container powering a given share or group of shares is recovered on a different host. An updated OVF can be automatically downloaded or manually updated to the vCenter managing the cluster. A non-disruptive rolling upgrade will proceed across the cluster replacing the old containers with the new version.
HCI Mesh is a feature introduced with vSAN 7 U1 that uses a unique software-based approach for disaggregation of compute and storage resources. HCI Mesh brings together multiple independent vSAN clusters for a native, cross-cluster architecture that disaggregates resources and enables utilization of stranded capacity. The basic functional premise is allowing one or more vSAN clusters clients to remotely mount Datastores from other vSAN clusters servers within vCenter inventory.
This approach maintains the essence and simplicity of HCI while greatly improving agility. This is known as an HCI Mesh Compute cluster, and provides storage services using native vSAN protocols for all new levels of flexibility and efficiency. This helps use stranded capacity between clusters. It also allows administrators and architects the ability to scale compute and storage independently, easing design and operational complexities.
When used with traditional vSphere clusters, it can provide the storage resources for the vSphere clusters. It uses native vSAN protocols for supreme levels of efficiency and functionality. HCI Mesh uses a software-based approach to disaggregation that can be implemented on any certified hardware.
Composable infrastructure is based-off a hardware-centric approach that requires specialized hardware. Unlike other solutions, VMware treats the disaggregation at the cluster level. This helps avoid the challenges associated with stop-gap approaches such as storage only nodes. HCI Mesh utilizes vSAN's native protocol and data path for cross-cluster connections, which preserves the vSAN management experience and provides the most efficient and optimized network transport.
When used with traditional vSphere clusters, vSAN 7 U2 and later can provide the storage resources for the vSphere clusters. A client cluster can mount up to a maximum of 5 remote vSAN datastores, and a server cluster can export it's datastore up to a maximum of 5 client clusters.
As of vSAN 7 U2, up to hosts can connect to a remote vSAN datastore - when counting the hosts from the client cluster s and the server cluster.
Additionally, HCI Mesh will not support remote provisioning of File Services shares and iSCSI volumes, these services can be provisioned locally on clusters participating in a mesh topology, but not provisioned on a remote vSAN datastore. Network requirements and best practices are very similar to vSAN Fault Domain configurations where data traffic travels east-west across multiple racks in the data center. In general, low-latency and high bandwidth network topologies are recommended for optimal performance.
Sub-millisecond latency between two clusters is recommended to provide the most optimal workload performance, however higher latencies will be supported for workloads that are not latency sensitive.
L2 or L3 topologies are supported, similar to other vSAN configurations. If the network connection between a client and server cluster is severed, the remote vSAN datastore on a client host will enter APD 60 seconds after the host becomes isolated from the server cluster. This is an extremely powerful new feature in vSAN 7 U2.
A vSAN 2-node cluster is a special type of vSAN cluster that consists of 2 hosts storing the data, and one host in the form of a virtual witness host appliance that provides quorum voting capabilities to determine availability, and prevent split-brain scenarios.
As of vSAN 7 U2, a stretched cluster can have up to 40 physical hosts 20 at each site. The answer is a qualified yes. There are no supportability considerations from the VMC perspective, the witness appliance is just another supported vSphere VM. Assigning site-level protection and a secondary level of protection is all achieved in a single storage policy.
The vSAN Stretched Cluster Bandwidth Sizing guide contains more information and recommendations specific to stretched clusters networking. While the Inter-site link ISL can be a significant contributor to the effective performance of a vSAN stretched cluster, it isn't the only factor.
Yes, it is easy to convert a standard non-stretched vSAN cluster to a stretched cluster. If a customer does not want to run an entire host as a witness host, then the witness appliance OVA file would be a perfect option. It is generally required to be the same release as vSAN. The underlying vSphere version is the same as the version running vSAN.
Yes, more than one witness appliance can be deployed on the same host. Yes, NSX-T is available for stretched clusters. Yes, in vSAN 7 U3 and newer, a 2-node topology can support a secondary level of resilience.
If hosts have 3 or more disk groups, a storage policy rule can be created to provide resilience across hosts to maintain availability in the event of a host failure , and resilience across disk groups, to maintain availability in the event of a failure of a host, and a secondary failure of a disk group in the remaining host online. In a 2-node environment, that secondary level of resilience can use RAID-1 mirroring, or if sufficient disk groups available in the hosts, RAID-5 erasure coding.
RAID-6 is not supported as the maximum number of disk groups per host is not enough to support the number needed to support this type of erasure code. If they are simultaneous failures, no, as this would not meet the levels sufficient for quorum. In vSAN 7 U3, data in one site can fail or be taken down for maintenance, followed by a subsequent outage of the witness host appliance, and the data will remain available. This enhancement also applies to 2-node clusters as well.
In a stretched cluster topology, the third location that holds a witness host appliance will determine quorum for the data in the stretched cluster. This prevents failure scenarios that could result in a split-brain configuration: The same VM running and updating data in two locations simultaneously. For 2-node clusters, the same principles apply, where the third entity is simply a witness host appliance at a remote location typically the primary datacenter and determines quorum for the two nodes in the cluster.
All blogs published prior to April 1, can be found at Virtual Blocks. Based on the feature required the relevant licenses would need to be obtained.
The following guide provides detailed insight of the topologies, features and their associated license edition - vSAN Licensing Guide.
Multiple NICs are recommended for redundancy. All-flash vSAN configurations require a minimum of 10Gb. Yes, this is a supported configuration.
Note that vSAN 6. Cluster Quickstart also makes the setup process much easier by streamlining the configuration of a distributed virtual switch including physical NIC assignment and the vmkernel ports for vSAN and vMotion.
Generally speaking, NIC teaming can provide a marginal improvement in performance, but this is not guaranteed. In general, a faster networking fabric will improve performance to a vSAN cluster when the existing network fabric is a significant contributor to contention.
As storage devices become faster, this can shift the primary point of contention to the network. There is no need to provision and implement specialized storage networking hardware to use vSAN.
While front-end VM traffic can run through network overlays, we highly recommend that all vmkernel traffic including vSAN traffic has as simple of a path as possible. Is there a common dashboard to view configuration, inventory, capacity information, performance data, and issues in the environment?
Additional analytics can be viewed courtesy of a "vRealize Operations within vCenter" functionality that exists directly in the UI of vCenter Server. This enhancement is powered by VMware vRealize Operations. If more information is needed, a click opens the full-featured vRealize Operations user interface. A vRealize Operations license is required for full functionality. A subset of dashboards is included with a vSAN license.
Cluster Quickstart makes it easy to add compute and storage capacity to a vSAN cluster. Storage capacity can be increased in a few ways:.
Hosts containing local storage devices can be added to a vSAN cluster. Disk groups must be configured for the new hosts after the hosts are added to the cluster. The additional capacity is available for use after configuration of the disk groups. This scale-out approach is most common and also adds compute capacity to the cluster. After the storage devices are added, additional disk groups can be created or existing disk groups reconfigured to use the new devices.
This is considered a scale-up approach. Storage and compute capacity can be quickly provisioned as needed. Cisco Umbrella. Schema Version 4. Cisco Virtual Security Gateway.
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