Search icon CANCEL
Subscription
0
Cart icon
Your Cart (0 item)
Close icon
You have no products in your basket yet
Arrow left icon
Explore Products
Best Sellers
New Releases
Books
Videos
Audiobooks
Learning Hub
Newsletter Hub
Free Learning
Arrow right icon
timer SALE ENDS IN
0 Days
:
00 Hours
:
00 Minutes
:
00 Seconds
VMware Virtual SAN Cookbook
VMware Virtual SAN Cookbook

VMware Virtual SAN Cookbook: The perfect guide to successful VMware Virtual SAN implementation and operations, with recipes to guide you through the process

Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Jeffrey Taylor
Arrow right icon
$19.99 per month
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5 (1 Ratings)
Paperback Aug 2015 208 pages 1st Edition
eBook
$24.99 $35.99
Paperback
$43.99
Subscription
Free Trial
Renews at $19.99p/m
Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Jeffrey Taylor
Arrow right icon
$19.99 per month
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5 (1 Ratings)
Paperback Aug 2015 208 pages 1st Edition
eBook
$24.99 $35.99
Paperback
$43.99
Subscription
Free Trial
Renews at $19.99p/m
eBook
$24.99 $35.99
Paperback
$43.99
Subscription
Free Trial
Renews at $19.99p/m

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?

Free for first 7 days. $19.99 p/m after that. Cancel any time!
Product feature icon Unlimited ad-free access to the largest independent learning library in tech. Access this title and thousands more!
Product feature icon 50+ new titles added per month, including many first-to-market concepts and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.
Product feature icon Innovative learning tools, including AI book assistants, code context explainers, and text-to-speech.
Product feature icon Thousands of reference materials covering every tech concept you need to stay up to date.
Subscribe now
View plans & pricing
Table of content icon View table of contents Preview book icon Preview Book

VMware Virtual SAN Cookbook

Chapter 2. Initial Configuration and Validation of Your VSAN Cluster

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics, with a recipe for each:

  • Preparing the vCenter cluster for VSAN
  • Applying VSAN licensing (optional)
  • Configuring VSAN networking on a new standard switch
  • Configuring VSAN networking on an existing switch
  • Enabling SSH on the ESXi hosts (if applicable)
  • Tagging disks as local solid-state drives (if applicable)
  • Enabling VSAN on your cluster
  • Manually claiming disks for use by VSAN (if applicable)
  • Performing initial validation of the new VSAN cluster
  • Enabling vSphere HA

Introduction

In this chapter, you will learn how to pull together all of the bits that you have prepared into a functional VSAN cluster.

By now, you will have selected the appropriate hardware to suit your needs by referencing the VMware Compatibility Guide. You will also have physically deployed your hardware, installed ESXi, created a cluster in vCenter, and added the hosts to that cluster.

Preparing the vCenter cluster for VSAN

There are some cluster-level prerequisites that must be satisfied before VSAN can be enabled. As we have already discussed, you will need a minimum of three hosts, with a minimum of one SSD and one spinning disk or capacity-tier SSD per host. This is probably optional, but it would help with 5.5/6.0 convergence of the text.

In addition, the following prerequisites need to be satisfied:

  • Disable vSphere HA
  • Apply licensing
  • Configure networking
  • Tagging disks as SSDs if using RAID-0 mode

Getting ready

You should be logged in to the vSphere Web Client as an administrator or user, authorized to alter cluster-level settings. All VSAN operations must be executed via the vSphere Web Client. The legacy vSphere Client is not supported for VSAN operations.

How to do it…

  1. To disable vSphere HA in preparation for VSAN enablement, you must browse the vSphere Web Client. Navigate to Home | Hosts and Clusters | Datacenter | Cluster | Manage:
    How to do it…
  2. If vSphere HA is enabled, click...

Applying VSAN licensing (optional)

Although it is integrated with vSphere and exists as a native extension to the ESXi hypervisor, VSAN is a separately licensed product. Like all vSphere products, VSAN will enable without a license for the default 60-day evaluation period. Despite this, it is best to license the VSAN cluster prior to full deployment, so as to avoid potential complications resulting from license expiration.

Getting ready

You should be logged in to the vSphere Web Client as an administrator or user, authorized to alter cluster-level settings and licensing/entitlement.

How to do it…

To add your VSAN license, you must browse the vSphere Web Client:

  1. Navigate to Home | Licensing | License Keys.
  2. Click on the green + icon to add a license key.
  3. Enter or paste your license key into the textbox.
  4. Click on Next.

How it works…

VSAN is licensed per-cluster. As VSAN is a distributed product, it is cluster-centric rather than host-centric. The license is applied to the vSphere cluster...

Configuring VSAN networking on a new standard switch

Note

If you are using the distributed virtual switch or already have a vSwitch configured, please skip this recipe and continue to the next recipe, Configuring VSAN networking on an existing switch.

Networking is the glue that holds the VSAN distributed storage nodes together. To permit redundancy, storage access, policy management, and so on, a robust and properly-configured network is key. From within vSphere, VSAN is enabled on a network interface as a service. If you are familiar with creating and enabling vMotion, management, and fault tolerance interfaces, you are already familiar with this process!

This recipe will cover the creation of a new VMkernel network interface in a new vSwitch with previously unused physical network adapters.

Getting ready

  • You should be logged in to the vSphere Web Client as an administrator or user, authorized to alter cluster-level settings and networking.
  • There should be physical 1GbE or 10GbE interfaces...

Configuring VSAN networking on an existing switch

Note

If you need to create a new standard switch for VSAN traffic, please skip this recipe and go back to the previous recipe, Configuring VSAN networking on a new standard switch.

Networking is the glue that holds the VSAN distributed storage nodes together. To permit redundancy, storage delivery, policy management, and so on, a robust and properly-configured network is key. From within vSphere, VSAN is enabled on a network interface as a service. If you are familiar with creating and enabling vMotion, management, and fault tolerance interfaces, you are already familiar with this process!

This recipe will cover the creation of a new VMkernel network interface in an existing vSwitch or dvPortGroup.

Getting ready

  • You should be logged in to the vSphere Web Client as an administrator or user, authorized to alter cluster-level settings and networking
  • There should be physical 1GbE or 10GbE interfaces available for use by VSAN
  • You should have a unique...

Enabling SSH on the ESXi hosts (if applicable)

Note

If you are running vSphere 6.0, please skip this section and refer to the Tagging disks as SSDs in vSphere 6.0 recipe in Chapter 9, VSAN 6.0, if you need to tag your disks as SSDs.

If you need to tag disks as SSD devices, you will need CLI access to the ESXi host. If we are using RAID-0 storage controllers, ESXi will detect the SSDs as normal magnetic drives due to the way RAID-0 controllers present storage to the operating system. The tagging process will only be applicable to SSDs that were not correctly identified as such by default. The SSD-tagging process requires several commands in vSphere 5.5 and it is easiest to perform these steps via a remote console (SSH).

Note

If SSH is already enabled on your hosts or if you will not need to tag SSDs, please skip this recipe.

Getting ready

You should be logged in to the vSphere Web Client as an administrator or user, authorized to alter host-level security profile settings.

How to do it…

To...

Introduction


In this chapter, you will learn how to pull together all of the bits that you have prepared into a functional VSAN cluster.

By now, you will have selected the appropriate hardware to suit your needs by referencing the VMware Compatibility Guide. You will also have physically deployed your hardware, installed ESXi, created a cluster in vCenter, and added the hosts to that cluster.

Preparing the vCenter cluster for VSAN


There are some cluster-level prerequisites that must be satisfied before VSAN can be enabled. As we have already discussed, you will need a minimum of three hosts, with a minimum of one SSD and one spinning disk or capacity-tier SSD per host. This is probably optional, but it would help with 5.5/6.0 convergence of the text.

In addition, the following prerequisites need to be satisfied:

  • Disable vSphere HA

  • Apply licensing

  • Configure networking

  • Tagging disks as SSDs if using RAID-0 mode

Getting ready

You should be logged in to the vSphere Web Client as an administrator or user, authorized to alter cluster-level settings. All VSAN operations must be executed via the vSphere Web Client. The legacy vSphere Client is not supported for VSAN operations.

How to do it…

  1. To disable vSphere HA in preparation for VSAN enablement, you must browse the vSphere Web Client. Navigate to Home | Hosts and Clusters | Datacenter | Cluster | Manage:

  2. If vSphere HA is enabled, click on the...

Applying VSAN licensing (optional)


Although it is integrated with vSphere and exists as a native extension to the ESXi hypervisor, VSAN is a separately licensed product. Like all vSphere products, VSAN will enable without a license for the default 60-day evaluation period. Despite this, it is best to license the VSAN cluster prior to full deployment, so as to avoid potential complications resulting from license expiration.

Getting ready

You should be logged in to the vSphere Web Client as an administrator or user, authorized to alter cluster-level settings and licensing/entitlement.

How to do it…

To add your VSAN license, you must browse the vSphere Web Client:

  1. Navigate to Home | Licensing | License Keys.

  2. Click on the green + icon to add a license key.

  3. Enter or paste your license key into the textbox.

  4. Click on Next.

How it works…

VSAN is licensed per-cluster. As VSAN is a distributed product, it is cluster-centric rather than host-centric. The license is applied to the vSphere cluster within vCenter...

Configuring VSAN networking on a new standard switch


Note

If you are using the distributed virtual switch or already have a vSwitch configured, please skip this recipe and continue to the next recipe, Configuring VSAN networking on an existing switch.

Networking is the glue that holds the VSAN distributed storage nodes together. To permit redundancy, storage access, policy management, and so on, a robust and properly-configured network is key. From within vSphere, VSAN is enabled on a network interface as a service. If you are familiar with creating and enabling vMotion, management, and fault tolerance interfaces, you are already familiar with this process!

This recipe will cover the creation of a new VMkernel network interface in a new vSwitch with previously unused physical network adapters.

Getting ready

  • You should be logged in to the vSphere Web Client as an administrator or user, authorized to alter cluster-level settings and networking.

  • There should be physical 1GbE or 10GbE interfaces available...

Configuring VSAN networking on an existing switch


Note

If you need to create a new standard switch for VSAN traffic, please skip this recipe and go back to the previous recipe, Configuring VSAN networking on a new standard switch.

Networking is the glue that holds the VSAN distributed storage nodes together. To permit redundancy, storage delivery, policy management, and so on, a robust and properly-configured network is key. From within vSphere, VSAN is enabled on a network interface as a service. If you are familiar with creating and enabling vMotion, management, and fault tolerance interfaces, you are already familiar with this process!

This recipe will cover the creation of a new VMkernel network interface in an existing vSwitch or dvPortGroup.

Getting ready

  • You should be logged in to the vSphere Web Client as an administrator or user, authorized to alter cluster-level settings and networking

  • There should be physical 1GbE or 10GbE interfaces available for use by VSAN

  • You should have a unique...

Left arrow icon Right arrow icon

Description

VMware Virtual SAN is a radically simple, hypervisor-converged storage, designed and optimized for vSphere virtual infrastructure. VMware introduced the software to help customers store more and more virtual machines. As data centers continue to evolve and grow, managing infrastructure becomes more challenging. Traditional storage solutions like monolithic storage arrays and complex management are often ill-suited to the needs of the modern data center. Software-defined storage solutions, like VMware Virtual SAN, integrate the storage side of the infrastructure with the server side, and can simplify management and improve flexibility. This book is a detailed guide which provides you with the knowledge you need to successfully implement and manage VMware VSAN and deployed infrastructures. You will start with an introduction to VSAN and object storage, before moving on to hardware selection, critical to a successful VSAN deployment. Next, you will discover how to prepare your existing infrastructure to support your VSAN deployment and explore Storage policy-Based Management, including policy changes, maintenance, validation, and troubleshooting VSAN. Finally, the book provides recipes to expedite the resolution process and gather all the information required to pursue a rapid resolution.

Who is this book for?

If you are an administrator of a VMware vSphere infrastructure and want to simplify storage delivery by integrating storage into vSphere, this book is for you. No extensive storage background is needed as VMware Virtual SAN integrates into the existing vSphere solutions with which you are already familiar.

What you will learn

  • Prepare your infrastructure for VMware Virtual SAN
  • Plan and build infrastructure solutions to suit your needs
  • Implement VMware Virtual SAN
  • Exploit the power of policybased management
  • Increase or decrease the scale of your Virtual SAN as needs change
  • Monitor your Virtual SAN infrastructure effectively
  • Respond to and troubleshoot problems

Product Details

Country selected
Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Aug 31, 2015
Length: 208 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782174547
Vendor :
VMware

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?

Free for first 7 days. $19.99 p/m after that. Cancel any time!
Product feature icon Unlimited ad-free access to the largest independent learning library in tech. Access this title and thousands more!
Product feature icon 50+ new titles added per month, including many first-to-market concepts and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.
Product feature icon Innovative learning tools, including AI book assistants, code context explainers, and text-to-speech.
Product feature icon Thousands of reference materials covering every tech concept you need to stay up to date.
Subscribe now
View plans & pricing

Product Details

Publication date : Aug 31, 2015
Length: 208 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782174547
Vendor :
VMware

Packt Subscriptions

See our plans and pricing
Modal Close icon
$19.99 billed monthly
Feature tick icon Unlimited access to Packt's library of 7,000+ practical books and videos
Feature tick icon Constantly refreshed with 50+ new titles a month
Feature tick icon Exclusive Early access to books as they're written
Feature tick icon Solve problems while you work with advanced search and reference features
Feature tick icon Offline reading on the mobile app
Feature tick icon Simple pricing, no contract
$199.99 billed annually
Feature tick icon Unlimited access to Packt's library of 7,000+ practical books and videos
Feature tick icon Constantly refreshed with 50+ new titles a month
Feature tick icon Exclusive Early access to books as they're written
Feature tick icon Solve problems while you work with advanced search and reference features
Feature tick icon Offline reading on the mobile app
Feature tick icon Choose a DRM-free eBook or Video every month to keep
Feature tick icon PLUS own as many other DRM-free eBooks or Videos as you like for just $5 each
Feature tick icon Exclusive print discounts
$279.99 billed in 18 months
Feature tick icon Unlimited access to Packt's library of 7,000+ practical books and videos
Feature tick icon Constantly refreshed with 50+ new titles a month
Feature tick icon Exclusive Early access to books as they're written
Feature tick icon Solve problems while you work with advanced search and reference features
Feature tick icon Offline reading on the mobile app
Feature tick icon Choose a DRM-free eBook or Video every month to keep
Feature tick icon PLUS own as many other DRM-free eBooks or Videos as you like for just $5 each
Feature tick icon Exclusive print discounts

Frequently bought together


Stars icon
Total $ 125.97
Getting Started with VMware Virtual SAN
$26.99
VMware vSphere Troubleshooting
$54.99
VMware Virtual SAN Cookbook
$43.99
Total $ 125.97 Stars icon

Table of Contents

12 Chapters
1. Hardware Selection for Your VSAN Cluster Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Initial Configuration and Validation of Your VSAN Cluster Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Storage Policy-based Management Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Monitoring VSAN Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. VSAN Maintenance Operations Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Ruby vSphere Console Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Troubleshooting VSAN Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Support Success Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. VSAN 6.0 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
A. Chapter-specific Expansions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
B. Additional VSAN Information Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
(1 Ratings)
5 star 100%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Charbel Nemnom Sep 09, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I'm one of the technical reviewers of this book. The book is very well suited for both newcomers to VMware Software-Defined Storage as veterans. The first chapters contain recipes of how to choose your Virtual SAN hardware according to best practices while later chapters are about more advanced topics.Each recipe contains a brief introduction and is explained step by step with screenshots on how to build your VSAN Cluster successfully so you can follow along on your own preference. At the end of each recipe a summary is available with extra information about the different steps and the end result.I'm happy having gotten the opportunity to work on this book and I'm very well pleased with the result. I believe this book is a great asset to any VMware professional and expert.Happy Reading!/Charbel
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Get free access to Packt library with over 7500+ books and video courses for 7 days!
Start Free Trial

FAQs

What is included in a Packt subscription? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

A subscription provides you with full access to view all Packt and licnesed content online, this includes exclusive access to Early Access titles. Depending on the tier chosen you can also earn credits and discounts to use for owning content

How can I cancel my subscription? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

To cancel your subscription with us simply go to the account page - found in the top right of the page or at https://subscription.packtpub.com/my-account/subscription - From here you will see the ‘cancel subscription’ button in the grey box with your subscription information in.

What are credits? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Credits can be earned from reading 40 section of any title within the payment cycle - a month starting from the day of subscription payment. You also earn a Credit every month if you subscribe to our annual or 18 month plans. Credits can be used to buy books DRM free, the same way that you would pay for a book. Your credits can be found in the subscription homepage - subscription.packtpub.com - clicking on ‘the my’ library dropdown and selecting ‘credits’.

What happens if an Early Access Course is cancelled? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Projects are rarely cancelled, but sometimes it's unavoidable. If an Early Access course is cancelled or excessively delayed, you can exchange your purchase for another course. For further details, please contact us here.

Where can I send feedback about an Early Access title? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

If you have any feedback about the product you're reading, or Early Access in general, then please fill out a contact form here and we'll make sure the feedback gets to the right team. 

Can I download the code files for Early Access titles? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

We try to ensure that all books in Early Access have code available to use, download, and fork on GitHub. This helps us be more agile in the development of the book, and helps keep the often changing code base of new versions and new technologies as up to date as possible. Unfortunately, however, there will be rare cases when it is not possible for us to have downloadable code samples available until publication.

When we publish the book, the code files will also be available to download from the Packt website.

How accurate is the publication date? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

The publication date is as accurate as we can be at any point in the project. Unfortunately, delays can happen. Often those delays are out of our control, such as changes to the technology code base or delays in the tech release. We do our best to give you an accurate estimate of the publication date at any given time, and as more chapters are delivered, the more accurate the delivery date will become.

How will I know when new chapters are ready? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

We'll let you know every time there has been an update to a course that you've bought in Early Access. You'll get an email to let you know there has been a new chapter, or a change to a previous chapter. The new chapters are automatically added to your account, so you can also check back there any time you're ready and download or read them online.

I am a Packt subscriber, do I get Early Access? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Yes, all Early Access content is fully available through your subscription. You will need to have a paid for or active trial subscription in order to access all titles.

How is Early Access delivered? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Early Access is currently only available as a PDF or through our online reader. As we make changes or add new chapters, the files in your Packt account will be updated so you can download them again or view them online immediately.

How do I buy Early Access content? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Early Access is a way of us getting our content to you quicker, but the method of buying the Early Access course is still the same. Just find the course you want to buy, go through the check-out steps, and you’ll get a confirmation email from us with information and a link to the relevant Early Access courses.

What is Early Access? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Keeping up to date with the latest technology is difficult; new versions, new frameworks, new techniques. This feature gives you a head-start to our content, as it's being created. With Early Access you'll receive each chapter as it's written, and get regular updates throughout the product's development, as well as the final course as soon as it's ready.We created Early Access as a means of giving you the information you need, as soon as it's available. As we go through the process of developing a course, 99% of it can be ready but we can't publish until that last 1% falls in to place. Early Access helps to unlock the potential of our content early, to help you start your learning when you need it most. You not only get access to every chapter as it's delivered, edited, and updated, but you'll also get the finalized, DRM-free product to download in any format you want when it's published. As a member of Packt, you'll also be eligible for our exclusive offers, including a free course every day, and discounts on new and popular titles.