I’ve seen a few questions around this, is it possible, or supported, to use vSAN Datastore Sharing aka HCI Mesh to connect OSA with ESA? Or of course the other way around. I can be brief about this, no it is not supported and it isn’t possible either. vSAN HCI Mesh or Datastore Sharing uses the vSAN proprietary protocol called RDT. When using vSAN OSA a different version is used of RDT than with… Source ..read more

I’ve had this question twice in about a week, which means that it is time to write a quick post. How do you stop vCLS VMs from running on a vSphere HA Failover Host? For those who don’t know, a vSphere HA Failover Host is a host which is used when a failure has occurred and vSphere HA needs to restart VMs. In some cases customers (but usually Cloud partners) want to prevent the use of these hosts… Source ..read more

You may have noticed it already, but the Unexplored Territory Podcast kind of pivoted. Instead of having two co-hosts we recently decided to only have 1 host and a guest. We noticed that during our conversations with our guests things became a bit more challenging when there were multiple hosts, and we hope that this small tweak makes the content easier to digest for you (the listener) as well. Source ..read more

I had a meeting last week with a customer and a question came up around the minimum number of hosts a cluster requires in order to use. particular RAID configuration for vSAN. I created a table for the customer and a quick paragraph on how this works and figured I would share it here as well. With vSAN ESA VMware introduced a new feature called “Adaptive RAID-5”. I described this feature in this… Source ..read more

For episode 065 of the Unexplored Territory Podcast I invited Jatin Purohit to discuss Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and what was introduced since we had Richard Garsthagen on as a guest. Jatin went over all the details, and shared some great use cases with us. Make sure to listen to the episode via your favorite podcast app, or the embedded player below. We are now starting to plan for the… Source ..read more

Holidays are coming, so we figured it was time to lower the price of the vSAN ESA 8.0 U1 book! Haven’t bought it yet? The paper edition is around $ 19.99 and the ebook is $ 4.99 (or less, depending on where you live). It’s a lot of great content for a really low price, and as said we made sure the ebook is priced extremely aggressively as we prefer for technical books not to be printed. Pick it up... Source ..read more

I got a question earlier about the maintenance of an ISL in a vSAN Stretched Cluster configuration which had me thinking for a while. The question was what would you do with your workload during maintenance. I guess the easiest of course is to power off all VMs and simply shutdown the cluster, for which vSAN has a UI option, and there’s a KB you can follow. Now, of course, there could also be a... Source ..read more

CALL TO ACTION: Everyone knows someone with cancer, who passed away as a result of cancer, or maybe even won the battle against cancer. I have seen too many family members and friends fight the battle and lose. For this reason, I decided to participate in the Roparun this year. The Roparun non-profit organization aims to help organizations (financially) in Holland that provide Palliative care for... Source ..read more

This question has come up a few times now, what does Datastore Sharing/HCI Mesh/vSAN Max support when stretched? It is a question which keeps coming up somehow, and I personally had some challenges to find the statements in our documentation as well. I just found the statement and I wanted to first of all point people to it, and then also clarify it so there is no question. If I am using Datastore... Source ..read more

Two months ago VMware introduced vSAN Max at VMware Explore. I wrote about it in this blog. Last week I had a conversation with Kalyan Krishnaswamy on the topic of vSAN Max, for which Kalyan is the Product Manager. I figured I would share the episode via my blog as well for those who are not subscribed to the Unexplored Territory podcast just yet. Note, you can either listen to it below... Source ..read more