Michael Schroeder - ElasticSky

26. May 202226. May 2022

Major Updates to vExpert Application Process

VMware has updated the application process for the vExpert program. The application is now possible all year round. Only during the selection process the portal will be closed for about 2 weeks. This is usually in February for the first half of the year and in the July/August area for the second half of the year.

For more details, check out Corey Romeo’s post at VMware vExpert blog.

If you have any questions about the application process or need assistance, please feel free to contact me or any of the other vExpertPro.

17. May 202215. March 2024

vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3e released

VMware has released a patch update 3e for vCenter. This is a maintenance release and primarily adds updates for vSphere with Tanzu. There are also separate release notes for vSphere with Tanzu.

What’s New?

Added Network Security Policy support for VMs deployed via VM operator service – Security Policies on NSX-T can be created via Security Groups based on Tags. It is now possible to create NSX-T based security policy and apply it to VMs deployed through VM operator based on NSX-T tags.
Supervisor Clusters Support Kubernetes 1.22 – This release adds the support of Kubernetes 1.22 and drops the support for Kubernetes 1.19. The supported versions of Kubernetes in this release are 1.22, 1.21, and 1.20. Supervisor Clusters running on Kubernetes version 1.19 will be auto-upgraded to version 1.20 to ensure that all your Supervisor Clusters are running on the supported versions of Kubernetes.

Check before update

If you upgraded vCenter Server from a version prior to 7.0 Update 3c and your Supervisor Cluster is on Kubernetes 1.9.x, the tkg-controller-manager pods go into a CrashLoopBackOff state, rendering the guest clusters unmanageable

Read KB 88443 for a workaround.

Test K8s Version

Make sure you’re on a supported K8s version.

Menu > Workload Management > Subervisor Clusters

The image above indicates we’re already on version 1.21, which is good for an update.

Update

Before updating your VCSA make sure you have a configuration backup! An optional VM snapshot is a good idea too. It might help to revert settings fast in case something goes wrong.

You can either apply the update from VAMI or from the shell. The image below shows an overview of the new packages with this update.

After the update is installed you will have an option to deploy a new Kubernetes version in your Supervisor Control Plane.

11. April 20226. July 2022

An Insight into vSAN-Striping

This article is a result of questions that are asked frequently by my students in vSAN classes. The subject of striping sounds very simple at first, but it turns out to be quite complex once you start going away from the simple standard examples. We shed light on the striping behavior of vSAN objects in mirroring, erasure coding, and for large objects. We also show the different striping behavior before vSAN 7 Update 1 and after.

What is striping?

Striping generally refers to a technique in which logically sequential data is segmented in such a way that successive segments are stored on different physical storage devices. Striping does not create redundancy. In fact, the opposite is true. In traditional storage, striping is also referred to as RAID 0 (note: RAID 0 -> zero redundancy). By distributing the segments over several devices that can be accessed in parallel, the overall data throughput is increased while latency is reduced.

Stripe size or stripe width is the number of segments an object is split into.

With a stripe width of 2, an object of 100 GB, for example, is split into two components of 50 GB each and distributed across two storage devices. This corresponds to a RAID 0.

14. March 20224. April 2022

vSAN Cluster Live-Migration to new vCenter instance

What can be done if the production vCenter Server appliance is damaged and you need to migrate a vSAN cluster to a new vCenter appliance?

In this post, I will show how to migrate a running vSAN cluster from one vCenter instance to a new vCenter under full load.

Anyone who works with vSAN will have a sinking feeling in their guts thinking about this. Why would one do such a thing? Wouldn’t it be better to put the cluster into maintenance mode? – In theory, yes. In practice, however, we repeatedly encounter constraints that do not allow a maintenance window in the near future.

Normally, vCenter Server appliances are solid and low-maintenance units. Either they work, or they are completely destroyed. In the latter case, a new appliance could be deployed and a configuration restore could be applied from the backup. None of this applied to a recent project. VCSA 6.7 was still working halfway, but key vSAN functionality was no longer operational in the UI. An initial idea to fix the problem with an upgrade to vCenter v7 and thus to a new appliance proved unsuccessful. Cross-vCenter migration of VMs (XVM) to a new vSAN cluster was also not possible, firstly because this feature was only available starting with version 7.0 update 1c, and secondly because only two new replacement hosts were available. Too few for a new vSAN cluster. To make things worse, the source cluster was also at its capacity limit.

There was only one possible way out: stabilize the cluster and transfer it to a new vCenter under full load.

There is an old, but still valuable post by William Lam on this topic. With this, and the VMware KB 2151610 article, I was able to work out a strategy that I would like to briefly outline here.

The process actually works because, once set up and configured, a vSAN cluster can operate autonomously from the vCenter. The vCenter is only needed for purposes of monitoring and configuration changes.