VxRail/vSAN

Have you ever been upgrading VxRail and the composite bundle upload stalls at 66% during the unpacking composite bundle bootstrap?  It happened to me recently.  Here is a quick fix that has worked for me in the past I wanted to share. However; I cannot stress enough that if you are not experienced enough or … Read more

A requirement to deploy a VxRail cluster is to create a VxRail management user and password on your vCenter Server.  The password for this user does expire in VxRail manager.  The fix for this is quick and painless but VxRail Manager informs you when the password has expired and mutes health monitoring services until you … Read more

In my last article I showed how to upgrade from 4.5 to 4.7.  In this article I thought I would make a quick guide from upgrading from 4.7.x to 4.7.x since DellEMC’s documentation is a little off.  Now with the VxRail Manager plug-in capability in vCenter it does finally feel a like a single pane … Read more

Role and career pre-HCI & SDDC I was fortunate when I began my career to have EMC as my first employer. At the time EMC was known as the storage giant in IT. I began my career in support but shared an office with the local Pre-Sales teams. This gave me a great insight into … Read more

This is a continuation of my upgrade series I was requested to post. In an earlier article you saw how to upgrade your external vCenter from 6.5 to 6.7U3, which must be performed prior to upgrading your VxRail. I know many engineers who have been waiting for 6.7U3 to go GA prior to upgrading their … Read more

I received a lot of feedback from my last certification exam review blog so I thought I would write one for my 6.7 vSAN Specialist. I will be the first to admit that I thought this exam was very straight forward and was truely testing your knowledge of vSAN. I will also admit I did … Read more

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 … Read more

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, … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

There may be instances where you Need to factory reset a VxRail node. IE you are creating a new cluster, a fresh install is failing, or because you feel like it 🙂 Here is an easy step by step guide on how to RASR reset a VxRail host.*Please remember you are going to be taking … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

I thought I would make my first VxRail post over a topic I get asked frequently about, which is how difficult is it to upgrade a VxRail. Having performed many VxRail upgrades over the years I’d like to start by saying these are my own personal notes and style for upgrading VxRail. This post is … Read more