vSphere

Recently, I have been getting a lot of requests for “advice” on how to re-deploy VxRail. Apparently, the 13G server line and older G-Series appliances still have a use when upgrading to 14G hardware. Lab environment for staging a like for like Production environment to test out code updates, POCs, and anything else you desire … Explore: How to Perform VxRail 4.7 Cluster Install

Last week I was on a reference call in regards to VxRail. I was asked many questions but one surprising question was, “How difficult is it to add storage?” I thought I would write a quick article to show just how it is done.In a regular vSAN cluster you would need to add the drives, … Explore: VxRail – Add drives to Cluster

In the last couple of weeks I have had to perform a few VxRail upgrades to particular code levels. As many of you know this requires downloading the particular code bundle IE 4.5.229 and performing a local upgrade. However, on two separate clusters in two separate datacenters I noticed that the bundle upload was taking … Explore: VxRail Composite Bundle taking abnormal amount of time…

From time to time you may encounter an error where your VxRail node goes into a device missing state in VxRail manager but is operating normally in vCenter. The main culprit behind this is typically the PTAgent. The PTAgent exists to poll hardware information on a node every few minutes using ipmi. Assuming there isn’t … Explore: VxRail PTAgent Troubleshooting – Device Missing State

Prepare and perform a VxRail 4.7 RASR factory reset with data-loss warnings, prerequisites, legacy boot steps, troubleshooting, and post-reset recovery checks.

There are instances where you may need to remove a node from your VxRail cluster.  One instance may be moving the host from one cluster to another (ensure host is at same code level as the new cluster).  Another instance you may be you are wanting to shrink a large cluster into two smaller manageable … Explore: How to remove a VxRail 4.7 Node from…

Lately, I have had people messaging asking to help them troubleshoot their environment. Everything from random performance impacts to my SQL DBA says I have a disk IO issue. I thought I would take the time to post a few helpful ruby shell commands I use to help me keep an eye on my own … Explore: Useful Ruby Shell vSAN Commands

It feels like I cannot go a week without being asked the question of, “What is my real capacity on vSAN/VxRail?”  Followed by we just cannot get our capacity planning correct and we are determining how much more capacity to grow our cluster by.  I thought I would perform a back to basic vSAN math … Explore: VxRail / vSAN Capacity Math Made Easy

Recently, I have been getting a lot of questions around how to build vSAN for high performing workloads. This article is intended to cover hardware differences, slack space, what is vSAN namespace, object, component, Raid-1 vs Raid-5/6, and stripe width, which all can impact performance. Please keep in mind I am not covering dedup/compression overhead … Explore: Performance Tuning your vSAN / VxRail Environment

I wanted to cover real quick creating a custom storage policy on vSAN, which even on a VxRail is done in vCenter. House keeping items:Raid 1 mirror is where you write a complete replica of the object. This is the highest performance protection you can apply to an object. Since it is a complete replica … Explore: Create a new vSAN Storage Policy in vSphere…