What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part V: Rate Control for Automatic VMFS UNMAP

vSphere 6.7 core storage “what’s new” series:

VMware has continued to improve and refine automatic UNMAP in vSphere 6.7. In vSphere 6.5, VMFS-6 introduced automatic space reclamation, so that you no longer had to run UNMAP manually to reclaim space after virtual disks or VMs had been deleted.

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ESXi iSCSI, Multiple Subnets, and Port Binding

With the introduction of our Active-Active Synchronous Replication (called ActiveCluster) I have been getting more and more questions around multiple-subnet iSCSI access. Some customers have their two arrays in different datacenters, and also different subnets (no stretched layer 2).

With ActiveCluster, a volume exists on both arrays, so essentially the iSCSI targets on the 2nd array just look like additional paths to that volume–as far as the host knows it is not a two arrays, it just has more paths.

Consequently, this discussion is the same as if you happen to have a single array using more than one subnet for its iSCSI targets or if you are using active-active across two arrays.

Though there are some different considerations which I will talk about later.

First off, should you use more than one subnet? Well keeping things simple is good, and for a single FlashArray I would probably do that. Chris Wahl wrote a great post on this awhile back that explains the ins and out of this well:

http://wahlnetwork.com/2015/03/09/when-to-use-multiple-subnet-iscsi-network-design/ 

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