Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

Original: http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2014/02/why-you-should-rename-default-vsan.html

One thing I found early in using VSAN is that the VSAN datastore name is automatically chosen for you and always defaults to vsanDatastore. This is not a bad thing, because it further simplifies the already simple VSAN setup operation. To enable VSAN, simply select the check box in the vSphere cluster configuration as you would if you enabled vSphereDRS or HA.

From an operational point of view, I think this may be a potential problem. What happens when there are multiple vSphere clusters, or even multiple VSAN clusters, across different vSphere data center objects under the same vSphere data center? I recently encountered this problem while recreating my lab environment. Can you see the problem in the screenshot below?

Here, there are two VSAN data stores under the same vSphere data center. Data store names under the same vSphere data center must be unique. I'm sure some of you have already encountered this problem when using the default "datastore1" local data store name. VSphere automatically adds "(n)" to the name, where n is the number of instances found in the environment.

In the following example, we have two VSAN data stores, but the two data stores are scattered across two vSphere data centers. The situation is even worse because unique names are enforced within the boundaries of the data center, because you use the same name across two VSAN clusters.

Although users are likely to go deep into a specific environment when setting up virtual machines, I think it is important for the infrastructure to have a good naming scheme. When someone audits all your virtual machines, what happens if they all show "vsanDatastore" datastore names? what if you have multiple VSAN clusters? Would it be more useful if the datastore name provided more details to help remap the datastore back to a logical / physical container? Personally, I think so, and doing so can be of great help in the troubleshooting process where time is precious.

Fortunately, this problem can be easily fixed because the VSAN data store operates like any other data store, and you can rename it. VSAN itself does not use this name to identify unique data stores, it implements a unique UUID for each VSAN data store. As long as you rename the VSAN data store to a more appropriate name, such as joining the vSphere cluster name, you can be of great help when you need to connect the virtual authority back to a specific compute / storage resource.

I was wondering if it would be useful to add a feature in VSAN that automatically adds the vSphere cluster name to the default VSAN data store name? What do you think?

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Author: William Lam

He is currently the lead engineer of VMwareR&D, a member of SDDC's emerging solutions team. Currently, he is working on prototyping at VMware, building new solutions and bringing them to market. His work focuses on software-defined data center (SDDC) automation and SDDC general integration and operations from the perspectives of API and SDK. He also works closely with several engineering teams within VMware to help provide early feedback on design and architecture. Finally, through customer interaction and feedback, he constantly meets customer challenges and insists on meeting customer needs, so as to better improve VMware products.

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