My vSAN Notes – Part 2

The vSAN File Services are used to create file shares in the vSAN datastore that client workstations or VMs can access. The data stored in a file share can be accessed from any device that has access rights. vSAN File Service is a layer that sits on top of vSAN to provide file shares. It currently supports SMB, NFSv3
and NFSv4.1 file shares. vSAN File Service comprises of vSAN Distributed File System (vDFS) which provides the underlying scalable filesystem by aggregating vSAN objects, a Storage Services Platform which provides resilient file server end points and a control plane for deployment, management, and monitoring.

> File shares are integrated into the existing vSAN Storage Policy Based Management, and on a per-share basis. vSAN File Service brings in capability to host
the file shares directly on the vSAN cluster.

>When you configure the vSAN File Service, vSAN creates a single vDFS distributed file system for the cluster which will be used internally for management
purposes

A static IP address pool should be provided as an input while enabling the file service workflow. One of the IP addresses is designated as the primary IP address
. The primary IP address can be used for accessing all the shares in the File Services cluster with the help of SMB and NFSv4.1 referrals. A file server is
started for every IP address provided in the IP pool. However, the file shares are evenly distributed across all the file servers. To provide computing
resources that help manage access requests, the number of IP addresses must be equal to the number of hosts in the vSAN cluster. These IP addresses must have
DNS forward and reverse lookup entries

With vSAN 7, the performance service is automatically enabled at the cluster level. The performance service is responsible for collecting and presenting Cluster,
Host and Virtual Machine performance-related metrics for vSAN powered environments. The performance service is integrated into ESXi, running on each host,
and collects the data in a database, as an object on a vSAN Datastore. The performance service database is stored as a vSAN object independent of vCenter Server.

“Front End” VM traffic is defined as the type of storage traffic being generated by the VMs themselves (the reads they are requesting, and the writes they are committing). “Back End” vSAN traffic accounts for replica traffic (I/Os in order to make the data redundant/highly available), and well as synchronization traffic. Both of these traffic types take place on the dedicated vSAN vmkernel interface(s) per vSphere Host.

HCI Mesh brings together multiple independent vSAN clusters for a native, cross-cluster architecture that disaggregates resources and enables utilization of stranded capacity.Simply, vSAN allows one or more vSAN clusters to remotely mount datastores from other vSAN clusters (servers) within vCenter inventory.
This approach maintains the essence and simplicity of HCI by not fundamentally changing the existing HCI model or requiring specialized hardware. Now, a cluster with excess compute can mount excess storage from a remote vSAN cluster.HCI Mesh works by using the existing vSAN VMkernel ports, and transport
protocols end to end. Unique to VMware, HCI Mesh requires no specialized hardware. Customers can use any vSAN ReadyNode™ to share capacity across clusters. HCI Mesh is scalable. It can support up to 64 hosts across clusters in a mesh. A client cluster can mount up to five remote datastores.

You can encrypt data-in-transit in your vSAN Cluster and encrypt data-at-rest in your vSAN datastore.

vSAN can encrypt data in transit across hosts in the vSAN cluster. Data-in-transit encryption protects data as it moves around the vSAN cluster.

vSAN can encrypt data at rest in the vSAN datastore. Data-at-rest encryption protects data on storage devices, in case a device is removed from the cluster

> Changing the default repair delay time for a host failure in vSAN
vsan Config- Advances- Object Repair time

> Host Rebuild Reserve: The space reserved for rebuilding one host’s worth of capacity, should there be a sustained outage of a host.

Reserved Capacity: The total of operations reserve and host rebuild reserve.

> Operations Usage: The space being used temporarily in the “Operations Reserve” location for the purposes of resyncs, rebuilds, etc.

Fault domains enable you to protect against rack or chassis failure if your vSAN cluster spans across multiple racks or blade server chassis. You can create fault domains and add one or more hosts to each fault domain The Primary level of failures to tolerate policy for the cluster depends on the number of failures a virtual machine is provisioned to tolerate. When a virtual machine is configured with the Primary level of failures to tolerate set to 1 (PFTT=1), vSAN can tolerate a single failure of any kind and of any component in a fault domain, including the failure of an entire rack.

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