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hkg2581
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Need Feedback on my blog Post : "How to Upgrade vSAN with best practice"

Hello Everyone,

I wrote this blog post after spending some good time here @ How to upgrade vSAN with Best Practices ? - VirtualllySensei.com . I would here some feedback if I missed anything and more useful content for the vSAN community .

Please also do see Objects and Components Deep dive : Understanding objects and component creation and placement in vSAN

Any feedback is highly appreciated .

Regards,

Hareesh K G

Thanks, Hareesh K G Personal Blog : http://virtuallysensei.com
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3 Replies
mprazeres183
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi hkg2581,

Great blog, I just did go trough it, as we recently just upgraded our environment too, we used the method with no interuption and all worked great.
I would just add a point, that maybe wasn't available in the version you where using.

We are using HCL on the vSAN health section (under monitoring) this is very exiting and a great feature as you don't have to go searching for the HCL on the Matrix WEBPAGE.

I would suggest you to add this section as this is a real changer!

Otherwise, very good article!

Check my blog, and if my answere resolved the issue, please provide a feedback. Marco Frias - VMware is my World www.vmtn.blog
hkg2581
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

mprazeres183

Thanks for you feed back , I added that section as we see many times the NVMe cards / Fusion IO cards heath check plugin doesnt work well . Also to note the health check plugin checks for controller / controller mode / firmware and driver . It doesnt check the SSD model and its firmware. Hence thought including these checks.:smileyinfo:

I will make sure to include the health plugin recommendations  / TAB for recommended driver . Smiley Happy:smileycheck:

Thanks, Hareesh K G Personal Blog : http://virtuallysensei.com
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srodenburg
Expert
Expert

Hello Hareesh,

Looks good. There is one thing that I miss though, but there is not much you can do about it personally i guess.

In Part 6, where you talk about checking the controller hardware etc, a lot of customers will have run into, and will run into it in the future: the problem of "currently supported controllers, not being supported in newer vSAN versions".

Customers with LSI cards for example, will run into the problem that the hardware vendor (or VMware, not sure who's responsibility it is) does not test previously supported cards with newer vSAN versions. LSI is especially notorious as all but their latest 12G SAS HBA are no longer supported, if one would take the HCL literally. But those cards work fine. The LSI SAS 9207-8i is identical to the HP220 (which is just an OEM'ed 9207-8i) but HP did verify their card with vSAN 6.6 and other vendors, who also OEM that same card, do not always go through the trouble of re-certification.

So what you end up with is a perfectly working vSAN system, just like before the upgrade, but with an alert about unsupported hardware that will not go away (obviously).

So even though you cannot do anything about this, maybe it's an idea to at least make people aware that this could happen to them after an upgrade. It happened several times in the past and it will happen again, because that's the way the vSAN vendor eco-system works. Technically, it's all good and (large) customers will not start ripping out controllers out of all of their nodes, and replace them with a newer model, just to satisfy a meaningless alert.

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