I had two comments on my HCI Mesh compute only blogpost where both were reporting the same error when trying to mount a remote datastore. The error that popped up was the following: Failed to run the remote datastore mount pre-checks. I tried to reproduce it in my lab, as both had upgraded from 7.0 […]
Does vSAN Enhanced Durability work when you have a limited number of hosts?
Last week I had a question about how vSAN Enhanced Durability works when you have a limited number of hosts. In this case, the customer had a 3+3+1 stretched cluster configuration, and they wondered what would happen when they would place a host into maintenance mode. Although I was pretty sure I knew what would […]
vSAN File Services and Stretched Clusters!
As most of you probably know, vSAN File Services is not supported on a stretched cluster with vSAN 7.0 or 7.0U1. However, starting with vSAN 7.0 U2 we now fully support the use of vSAN File Services on a stretched cluster configuration! Why is that? In 7.0 U2, you now have the ability to specify […]
vSAN 7.0 U2 now integrates with vSphere DRS
One of the features our team requested a while back was integration between DRS and vSAN. The key use case we had was for stretched clusters. Especially in scenarios where a failure has occurred, it would be useful if DRS would understand what vSAN is doing. What do I mean by that? Today when customers […]
vSAN 7.0 U2 Durability Components?
Last week I published a new demo on my youtube channel (at the bottom of this post) and it discussed an enhanced feature called Durability Components. Some may know these as “delta components” as well. These durability components were introduced in vSAN 7.0 Update 1 and provided a mechanism to maintain the required availability for […]
vSAN 7.0 U2 Skyline Health History
I have already discussed this briefly during my 7.0 U2 video presentation, which can be found here, but I also wanted to share the demo I recorded with you, and provide some additional details. Over the past years, one of the most requested features for Skyline Health, or Health Check as it used to be […]
What is this Catalog folder on my datastore?
A question popped up on our internal slack earlier these days, and as I didn’t find anything online for it I figured I would write a quick article. When you look at your datastore, you may find various folders. Some you will recognize like the “.vSphere-HA” folder structure, which is used by vSphere HA, others […]
VMs which are not stretched in a stretched cluster, which policy to use?
I’ve seen this question popping up regularly. Which policy setting (“site disaster tolerance” and “failures to tolerate”) should I use when I do not want to stretch my VMs? Well, that is actually pretty straight forward, in my opinion, you really only have two options you should ever use: None – Keep data on preferred […]
vSphere HA configuration for HCI Mesh!
I wrote a vSAN HCI Mesh Considerations blog post a few weeks ago. Based on that post I received some questions, and one of the questions was around vSphere HA configurations. Interestingly I also had some internal discussions around how vSAN HCI Mesh and HA were integrated. Based on the discussions I did some testing […]
vSAN 7.0 U1 File Services with SMB and NFS support demo
I created this quick demo last week, and I figured I would share it here. It shows vSAN 7.0 U1 File Services with SMB and NFS support. I wrote about vSAN File Services and what is new in this post here, make sure to read that as well, and of course, it also details all […]