Virtual San 6.2 and VROPS

How to Add the VROPS Storage Pack for Storage Devices for Virtual SAN

1. Log into VROPS and click on the 5th Icon from the left.

2. Click on the "+" sign to add the storage pack.

3. Specify the location of the pack (archive) and proceed with the wizard.

4. Add the vCenter Server information.

5. Verify that additional Virtual San related information appears.

New Virtual San 6.2 Licensing Editions

New Virtual San 6.2 Licensing Editions

Site Recovery Manager 6.1

How to Configure S.R.M. 6.1

Step 1:

Install two different esxi hosts, two pscs and two vcenter servers. Create two Datacenter and take over the respective hosts. Then, create a generic 2008 vm (64 bit) to be used for SRM later on. I gave each 2k8 vm 2 vcpus, 8gbs of RAM and a 60GB hard drive. Once you finish, change the ip to static, change the name, join a domain and install vmware tools. Here is a capture of one of my sites at this point.

Step 2: 

Deploy the replication appliance on both sites via ovf using the web client. No captures needed for this step. Be careful during the wizard. Connect to the appliance via port 5480 once it boots up and log in as root to make sure the service is running. Notice the lower left corner.

Step 3: 

Log out from the web client and log in to ensure that the client plugin appears. Do this in both sites.  I noticed I had to restart the web client server service in one of my vcenters for it to display correctly. I used the linux appliance and the command was /etc/init.d/vsphere-client restart.

Step 4: 

Install the srm software on both sites. Here are the captures for one of the sites.

Step 4: 

Verify that the plugin is in place on both sites. You will need to log out and log in again.

Step 5:

Log in to the primary site and pair up the sites. Do so by clicking on the SRM plugin.

Step 6:

Once the pairing has been done, right click on the individual vms that you want to replicate. Next, configure your resource (datastores, folders, networks) mappings. You will have to create Resource Pools and Folders on both sites for this step.

Final Step:

Test the Recovery using the web client and verify with either tool.

 

Enabling Deduplication and Compression in 2 Steps

Virtual San 6.2 New Feature:

Deduplication and Compression are new features of Virtual SAN 6.2. Disabled by default, these features can be enabled by selecting the cluster, going to the Manage tab and selecting General.

Deduplication and compression can be enabled only as a unit, there is no way to enable one feature without the other.

Deduplication takes place when data is de-staged from the cache tier using a default 4k block.

Compression takes place immediately after deduplication and before data is written to the capacity tier. Data is compressed only if it can be reduced to 2k blocks or less. Otherwise, data is not compressed.

Is there a drawback?

Additional cpu cycles and reduced latency, mitigated that all the drives are flash devices.

Restrictions?

Deduplication and compression only work with the All-FLASH architecture.

Virtual SAN 6.2 IOPS Limits

What's New in Virtual San 6.2

Quality of Service (QoS) using IOPS limits is a new feature of Virtual San 6.2.  As you can see below, 6.2 allows the creation of virtual machine storage policies specifying IO limits.

Reasons to use this feature?  

What about the "noisy neighbor" that monopolizes all available IO.

Quality of service is normalized to a 32K block size. An example of an IOPS limit of 500 (up to 32k blocks) will result in 500 IOPS limits, while a block size of 64k would result in 250 IOPS.

How to do so:

1. Create a virtual machine storage policy and specify your desired limit.

2. Edit the virtual machine settings and bind the virtual disk to the policy. This can also be done when the virtual machine is created.

VSAN Observer 6.2

How to start and use the VSAN Observer

1. Putty into the vcenter appliance as root. Once you are there, type the following command:

rvc administrator@vsphere.local@localhost and start the VSAN Observer

2. Launch your browser and connect to your vcenter using https and port 8010

Click on "What am I looking at" to get an explanation of the different tabs and what they represent.

Examples:

What follows is a series of captures of all the tabs.