Impact of network maintenance on VMware vSAN

By Bart Oevering

Elevator Pitch

At a customer we were forced to think about what will happen to VMware vSAN at that moment network (specifically STP root bridge calculations) maintenance will be performed. Searching online didn’t gave that much information so join this story where I also share my troubleshooting experience.

Description

VMware vSAN heavily relies on a redundant network to guarantee the availability of the storage components. But what will happen to the availability when maintenance is performed to that network? In this situation the Spanning Tree Protocol will start to recalculate the root bridge and that has a huge effect on the availability of the network. Besides that, when the network is back and vSAN is still throwing errors how to recover vSAN?

Notes

This talk is a show case of a situation encountered at a customer.