Book Image

VMware Virtual SAN Cookbook

By : Jeffrey Taylor
Book Image

VMware Virtual SAN Cookbook

By: Jeffrey Taylor

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Investigating disk failures


When a disk fails in VSAN, it is important to address the problem by replacing the disk. A key part of this may be determining why the failure was triggered. Determining which disks have failed is a straightforward operation in vSphere Web Client. Determining the cause of the failure will involve investigating the ESXi system logs.

Getting ready

  • You should be logged into vSphere Web Client as an administrator

  • You should be logged in to the affected ESXi host as the root, preferably via SSH

How to do it…

  1. If you have configured VSAN alarms according to Chapter 4, Monitoring VSAN, when a disk fails you will be presented with an alert icon on the ESXi host and Triggered Alarms will reflect a disk error:

  2. The failed disk will also be reflected in the Disk Management view:

  3. From here, it is fairly straightforward to remove the failed disks and replace them if desired. However, finding out why the disks have failed will require examining the applicable host's /var/log/vmkernel...