Tag Archives: vSAN

VMware Certified Master Specialist – HCI 2022 (5V0-21.21) Exam Review

A few weeks ago, I successfully passed the 5V0-21.21 exam which is mainly based on vSAN 7, which awarded me the title of Master Specialist HCI for the first time 😃.

And I thought it would be nice to share my experience and provide some tips to anyone willing to take this exam.

VMware Certified Master Specialist – HCI 2022 Digital Badge

Before I give you some advices to prepare for the exam, let’s first review the prerequisites.

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What is HCI Mesh in vSAN 7 Update 2?

VMware released with vSAN 7 Update 2 a new feature called HCI Mesh to provide better scaling capabilities in a vSAN environment.

Before vSAN 7 Update 2, there’s always been a very tight integration between vSphere and vSAN that made both products dependent from each other, and it wasn’t possible either to consume storage from one vSAN cluster to another.

Now things have changed with HCI Mesh as a non-vSAN Cluster can now take advantage of a remote vSAN cluster to start provisioning VMs to a remote vSAN datastore.

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How to fix ESXi hosts showing out of sync with a distributed switch

Recently I was in charge of designing and implementing a new vSphere and vSAN infrastructure for a customer.

Everything went just fine, except that we all have experienced many network outages due to misconfiguration of some Firewall Virtual Appliances where the whole infrastructure relies on.

As a result, all ESXi got disconnected from the vCenter and this happened many times!

Anyway, the network team in the end fixed the issue and the network was finally stable but I have to say that I’m not a fan of firewall virtual appliance as it brings some limitations and complexity. Unfortunately, those outages had a bad impact on the virtualization network as some warnings appeared showing some ESXi hosts out of sync with the distributed switch.

Distributed Switch Warning

This could not be a big deal at the beginning but this kind of issue definitely needs to be addressed to avoid any network problem in the future.

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