Das Live Webinar ist durch, die Nervosität wieder weg, und die offenen Fragen konnten im Nachgang beantwortet werden. Die Vorbereitungen zum Webinar waren interessant und lehrreich, konnte ich doch mein Wissen über bestimmte Gebiete regelrecht updaten. Ich danke alle Teilnehmern für ihr Interesse und ihre sehr guten Fragen. Aufgrund der Zeitverhältnisse konnten wir leider nicht alle Fragen beantworten. Dies wurde diese Woche per Mail noch nachgeholt.
Falls ihr das Webinar verpasst habt könnt ihr es gerne unter folgendem Link nachschauen:
Die Slides zum Webinar gibt es hier. Und wer wissen möchte was für Fragen gestellt wurden, kann sich die Fragen & Antworten hier herunterladen.
Übrigens, falls ihr es noch nicht gehört habt…
Am 5. Dezember 2017 findet der grosse VeeamON Tour Virtual Event statt. Einen Tag lang gibt es live online Sessions und Recordings über alle wichtigen Themen. Wie Cloud Migration, Datenschutz, Best Practices, Management und Reporting, Continous Data Protection, Sicherung von AWS Instanzen und vCloud Director. Meldet euch an und reserviert euch einen Sitzplatz, egal ob zu Hause oder im Büro, der Event läuft online 😉
Since few months i’m working with VMware vSAN in my own vSphere homelab. And i tell you, i really like vSAN! If you’re looking for an easy, affordable, very well performing and scalable storage solution, there you go. VMware vSAN is ready to take all your workloads. It doesn’t matter if it’s just your nested lab environment, or something more serious like a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), big data or business critical applications like SQL databases and Microsoft Exchange servers.
How does vSAN work?
VMware vSAN takes the local disks of an ESXi hosts and puts them in a storage pool, a so called disk group. Put all disk groups of your ESXi hosts together in a cluster and you’ve got a vSAN datastore. It’s that easy. And it’s also easy to make changes to those disk pools. Add disks, remove disks, or change the complete layout of a disk pool.
vSAN max component size
When i recently rebuilt my vSphere homelab i figured out that there was an issue with the disk configuration:
When a capacity disk used for vSAN is smaller than 255 GB (default max component size), virtual machines that run on the vSAN Datastore might experience disk space issues. Please click on the Ask VMware button for instruction to change max component size.
I don’t like disk space issues. So i better fix that. You probably saw the small „Ask VMware“ button on the right hand side. If you click this button you will be directed to a VMware knowledge base article which describes in detail what happens here. Long story short, when vSAN stores virtual machine objects, it creates components whose default size does not exceed 255 GB. However, when you use magnetic disks that are smaller than 255 GB, these storage components might end up to be larger than actual underlying magnetic disks.
You could change some parameters like ClomMaxComponentSizeGB or you could change the disk layout, so to speak add bigger disks. So did i. I deleted each disk group, changed the disk size and reclaimed the changed disks for vSAN. The following steps will guide you through this process.
How to delete a disk group
First, enter your ESXi hosts in maintenance mode.
Specify how vSAN will evacuate data residing on the host before entering maintenance mode.
I didn’t have any VM running on the vSAN cluster because the lab was rebuilt from scratch.
If you’ve got VMs running, then please make sure you click „Evacuate all data“ or „Ensure data accessibility“ to make sure there is no data loss.
To delete the disk group of the host in maintenance mode, click your vSAN cluster => Configure => Disk Management.
Again, confirm in which way the vSAN cluster should evacuate the data residing on the host.
Now go ahead and change the disks in your ESXi hosts. In my case i just increased the size of the caching disk and also the capacity disks, but also deleted one of the capacity disks.
How to claim the new / changed disks for vSAN
After you changed the disks size (or added / removed disks) you can claim these disks for vSAN.
To do that, click again on your cluster => Configure => Disk Management.
Please make sure that you choose the correct disk / tier. Usually the smaller (and only one) disk is the caching tier.
HINT: Only one flash disk as caching device is possible per disk group.
That’s it. No tricks nor magic. Just easy vSAN management.
Please keep in mind:
When you add disks to a vSAN cluster with enabled deduplication and compression, specific considerations apply.
You can add a capacity disk to a disk group with enabled deduplication and compression. However, for more efficient deduplication and compression, instead of adding capacity disks, create a new disk group to increase cluster storage capacity.
When you remove a disk form a cache tier, the entire disk group is removed. Removing a cache tier disk when deduplication and compression are enabled triggers data evacuation.
Deduplication and compression are implemented at a disk group level. You cannot remove a capacity disk from the cluster with enabled deduplication and compression. You must remove the entire disk group.
If a capacity disk fails, the entire disk group becomes unavailable. To resolve this issue, identify and replace the failing component immediately. When removing the failed disk group, use the No Data Migration option.
I hope this guide will help you to make changes to your disk groups. I’m happy if you let me know that with a comment 😉
Vor einiger Zeit wurde ich von Veeam angefragt ob ich ein Live Webinar durchführen möchte. Nun, ich musste da nicht lange überlegen und habe zugesagt. Die Ideen sprudelten nur so aus mir raus. Naja, fast. Um ehrlich zu sein hatte ich plötzlich eine ziemliche Blockade und meine Musse hat sich spontan in den Kurzurlaub verabschiedet…
Es gibt hunderte Themen über die ich gerne sprechen würde. Seien das grössere technische Dinge oder doch eher die kleinen Tipps und Tricks die einem Admin das Leben etwas eifacher machen. Doch vieles wurde bereits in deutsch- oder englischsprachigen Webinars abgedeckt. Und ich wollte auch nicht einfach etwas aufwärmen sondern was neues bringen. Mein aktuelles Thema ist den meisten von euch sicher nicht neu. Jedoch wurde bis jetzt noch nicht im Rahmen eines Live Webinars darüber gesprochen.
Webinar mit dem VMware vExpert: Alles über das Thema VMware vSAN
Über dieses Thema werde ich am Live Webinar sprechen. Das Webinar dauert rund eine Stunde. Stefano Heisig, Senior System Engineer bei Veeam, euch zeigen wie Veeam mit vSAN umgeht und wie man VMs sichern kann. Veeam ist neuerding offiziell für VMware vSAN zertifiziert! Mein Teil wird viele Punkte rund um VMware vSAN abdecken. Und natürlich bleibt auch noch genügend Zeit für Fragen.
Most of us are working with computers, using text programs, database applications and web services throughout the day. And most of the time these services and applications work well. Why? Because there is an awesome sysadmin around keeping your business up and running!
Every year on the last Friday of July, this year it’s today, July 28th, some people celebrate. The last Friday of July is the System Administrator Appreciation Day, or Sysadmin Day! Yay!
But what is a sysadmin? And what’s the Sysadmin Day?
Some myths and legends say that a sysadmin is a very shy human. He / she is working all day long, and some times also during the night hours, or weekends or holidays. They keep your programs updated, your network secure and your infrastructure patched. And why? Because everyone want’s to use IT like running water. „My computer has to work properly, i wan’t have access to my mails on all my devices, whereever i am, whenever i like to. Oh, and don’t forget my favorite websites!“.
These shy figures are working hard, are always on duty. Not many people say thank you when a IT problem is solved, many people don’t understand the difference between megabyte and megahertz. Some people even don’t know what to do when the printer runs out of paper. Who you gonna call? The sysadmin!
That’s the reason why there is a special day for system administrators. Let’s appreciate their work, their tireless efforts, their devotion to servers, storage and networking. Let’s say thank you to our sysadmins! Because not all heros wear capes 😉
If you like to show your sysadmin your appreciation for his work, probably a small gift is a great idea. But what kind of gift does a sysadmin like?
Some ideas, but not limited to:
Cookies, brownies, cake
Coffee (quoffee, some readers will understand)
Energy drinks
Shirts
Mugs
Gadgets
There are so many great online shops out there in the interwebz, you’ll probably find a cool gift for your sysadmin.
Oh, did i forget to mention to add this day to your Outlook calendar? It’s easily done with a recurring appointment. Ask your sysadmin if you’re not sure how to do that 😉
Yes i know that, the title of this blog post doesn’t sound very well. But if you read this blog post you can see that it fits very well. Recently, just some days before the writing of this post, one of my customers called me because of a vCenter issue. He’s got two HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9 and an MSA 2040 SAS Dual Controller storage system.
The customer told me that some VM’s aren’t running anymore and that both hosts aren’t available in vCenter management. I made a quick look through remote support and saw that. Both hosts were gone, most of the VM’s still running but some not. We first tried to access the hosts through SSH but no success. We tried to access the DCUI with moderate success. At least we were able to logon, but the DCUI didn’t respond after successful login. That’s kind of strange, didn’t see that until yet. The hosts did respond to ping, so that’s at least a little light at the end of the tunnel.
We then decided to restart one host. We don’t have SSH (PuTTY) access to the hosts, we can’t manage them from vCenter, we can’t use the DCUI. What else could happen?
So we restarted a host. And this is the beginning of this story…
