vSAN 6.6 RVC Guide Part 5 - Performance Service

Posted by on July 26, 2017 No comments

The "vSAN 6.6 RVC Guide" series explains how to manage your VMware Virtual SAN environment with the Ruby vSphere Console. RVC is an interactive command line tool to control and automate your platform. If you are new to RVC, make sure to read the Getting Started with Ruby vSphere Console Guide. All commands are from the latest vSAN 6.6 version.

In the fifth part, I'm working with commands related to the vSAN performance service. These commands are used to enable and configure the vSAN Performance Service and gather performance related information.

  • vsan.perf.cluster_info
  • vsan.perf.resync_dashboard
  • vsan.perf.stats_object_create
  • vsan.perf.stats_object_info
  • vsan.perf.stats_object_delete
  • vsan.perf.stats_object_setpolicy

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    vSAN 6.6 RVC Guide Part 4 - Cluster Health

    Posted by on July 25, 2017 No comments

    The "vSAN 6.6 RVC Guide" series explains how to manage your VMware Virtual SAN environment with the Ruby vSphere Console. RVC is an interactive command line tool to control and automate your platform. If you are new to RVC, make sure to read the Getting Started with Ruby vSphere Console Guide. All commands are from the latest vSAN 6.6 version.

    In the fourth part, I'm working with commands related to the vSAN health plugin. These commands are only available when the Health Services are installed.

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    vSAN 6.6 RVC Guide Part 3 - Object Management

    Posted by on June 12, 2017 No comments

    The "vSAN 6.6 RVC Guide" series explains how to manage your VMware Virtual SAN environment with the Ruby vSphere Console. RVC is an interactive command line tool to control and automate your platform. If you are new to RVC, make sure to read the Getting Started with Ruby vSphere Console Guide. All commands are from the latest vSAN 6.6 version.

    The third part explains commands related to the object management in vSAN. These commands are used for troubleshooting or reconfiguration of objects. They also provide an insight on how vSAN works.

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    vSAN 6.6 RVC Guide Part 2 - Cluster-Administration

    Posted by on May 8, 2017 No comments

    The "vSAN 6.6 RVC Guide" series explains how to manage your VMware Virtual SAN environment with the Ruby vSphere Console. RVC is an interactive command line tool to control and automate your platform. If you are new to RVC, make sure to read the Getting Started with Ruby vSphere Console Guide. All commands are from the latest vSAN 6.6 version.

    The second part explains commands related to vSAN cluster administration tasks. These commands are required to gather information about ESXi hosts and the cluster itself. They also provide important information when you want to maintain your vSAN cluster or configure a stretched cluster:

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    vSAN 6.6 RVC Guide Part 1 - Basic Configuration

    Posted by on May 3, 2017 No comments

    The "vSAN 6.6 RVC Guide" series explains how to manage your VMware Virtual SAN environment with the Ruby vSphere Console. RVC is an interactive command line tool to control and automate your platform. If you are new to RVC, make sure to read the Getting Started with Ruby vSphere Console Guide. All commands are from the latest vSAN 6.6 version. The first part explains basic configuration tasks that are required for the initial setup:

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    How to silence VMware vSAN Health Checks

    Posted by on April 26, 2017 1 comment

    A new feature in vSAN 6.6 is the ability to silence Health Checks. In previous versions, it was already possible to disable alerts that are triggered by health checks. Silencing health checks is one step further and enables you to have a clean vSAN health. Silenced checks are displayed with a green checkmark and are marked as "Skipped".

    Especially for home labs, where unsupported hardware is used, this is a great feature.

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    vSAN 6.6 vMotion Basic Unicast Connectivity Health Check Fails

    Posted by on April 25, 2017 No comments

    After upgrading my lab to vSAN 6.6, I noticed that the newly introduced vMotion health check (vSAN Cluster > Monitor > vSAN > Health > Network) showed up as failed for the following checks:

    • Failed - vMotion: Basic (unicast) connectivity check
    • Failed - vMotion: MTU check (ping with large packet size)

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    VMware vSAN 6.6 Upgrade Steps

    Posted by on April 18, 2017 1 comment

    The VMware vSAN 6.6 has been released today. In this post, I am going to run through the 3 steps to upgrade vSAN 6.5 to vSAN 6.6. Upgrading Virtual SAN is a multistage process, in which you must perform the upgrade procedures in the order described here:

    1. Upgrade vCenter Server to version 6.5.0d
    2. Upgrade ESXi Hosts to version 6.5.0d
    3. Upgrade the vSAN on-disk format to version 5.0

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    VMware vSAN 6.6 GA - Download Links Available

    Posted by on April 18, 2017 2 comments

    Today VMware has made the bits for vSAN 6.6 available for everyone to download.

    What's New

    • Unicast - In vSAN 6.6, cluster communication has been redesigned to use unicast traffic. Multicast is no longer required on the physical switches to support the vSAN cluster.
    • Encryption - vSAN supports data-at-rest encryption of the vSAN datastore. When encryption is enabled, vSAN performs a rolling reformat of every disk group in the cluster.
    • Enhanced Stretched Clusters with Local Failure Protection - Previously, vSAN's was able to provide a fully active-active, stretched cluster. vSAN 6.6 takes this a step further, allowing for storage redundancy within a site AND across sites at the same time.
    • Site Affinity for Stretched Clusters - A new feature for vSAN 6.6 Stretched Clusters is the ability to configure site affinity.
    • Configuration Assist and Updates - New Configuration Assist and Updates pages allows to check the configuration of your vSAN cluster, and resolve any issues.
    • Resynchronization throttling - IOPS used for cluster resynchronization can be throttled to prevent performance bottlenecks.
    • vSAN Health Command Line Tool - A new esxcli command allows to check vSAN health from the command line (esxcli vsan health).
    • Degraded Device Handling - vSAN 6.6 provides a more proactively stable environment with the detection of degraded and failing devices.

    Additional Information

    PowerCLI Script to get ESXi Network/Storage Firmware and Driver Version

    Posted by on March 11, 2017 9 comments

    For a healthy vSphere virtualization infrastructure and to receive support from VMware it is important to verify that IO devices are listed in VMwares Compatibility Guide/Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) with their correct driver and firmware version. Gathering firmware details and comparing them to the HCL is very time-consuming. I made a small script that automatically gathers the following information:

    • IO Devices (NICs, HBAs and RAID Controllers)
    • Driver Version
    • Firmware Version
    • Official HCL Link

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