Month: July 2018

vSAN and Data-At-Rest Encryption – Why SED’s are not Supported (i.e. Part 3)

by pgkeilty, posted in Encryption, Software Defined Storage, Uncategorized, VSAN, VxRACK, VxRail

I first wrote about vSAN and Encryption here: Virtual SAN and Data-At-Rest Encryption

And then again here: vSAN and Data-At-Rest Encryption – Rebooted (i.e. Part 2)

And then vSAN Encryption went live in vSAN 6.6 announced here: vSAN 6.6 – Native Data-at-Rest Encryption

Today I was asked if vSAN supports Self Encrypting Drives (SED). The answer is No. The vSAN product team looked at SEDs but there are too few choices, they are too expensive, and they increase the operational burden.

vSAN only supports vSAN Encryption, VM Encryption, or other 3rd party VM encryption solutions like HyTrust DataControl.

vSAN is Software Defined Storage so the product team decided to focus on software-based encryption to allow vSAN to support data at rest encryption (D@RE) on any storage device that exists today or will come in the future. When vSAN went live supporting Intel Optane, this new flash device was immediately capable of D@RE. The vSAN Encryption operational model is simple. Just click a check box to enable it on the vSAN datastore and point to a Key Management Server. One encryption key to manage for the entire vSAN datastore. The additional benefits of vSAN Encryption is that it supports vSAN Dedupe and Compression and vSAN 6.7 encryption has achieved FIPS 140-2 validation.

Another choice is to leverage VMware’s VM Encryption described here: What’s new in vSphere 6.5: Security
This is per VM encryption, so you point vCenter to a Key Management Server and then enable encryption per VM via policy. This flexibility allows some VM’s to be encrypted and some not to be. And, if the VM is migrated to another vSphere cluster or to VMware Cloud on AWS, the encryption and key management follows the VM. This requires the administrator to manage a key per VM, and because the encryption happens immediately as the write leaves the VM and goes through the VAIO filter, no storage system will be able to dedupe the VM’s data since each block is unique.

Finally, there are various 3rd party per VM encryption solutions on the market that vSAN would also support. For instance, HyTrust Datacontrol.

I hope this helps clear up what options there are for vSAN encryption and the various tradeoffs.

VMworld 2018 – My 2 Breakout Sessions

by pgkeilty, posted in Encryption, Uncategorized, VMware, VMworld, VSAN

I’m looking forward to VMworld 2018 in a few weeks. It’s always a long week but a great time. I look forward to catching up with coworkers, partners, customers, and friends. And, I’ll also have to do a little work. This year I have 2 breakout speaking sessions.

vSAN Technical Customer Panel on vSAN Experiences [HCI1615PU]
Monday, Aug 27, 12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.

The Panel will consist of 4 vSAN customers: General Motors, United States Senate Federal Credit Union, Rent-A-Center, and Brinks Oakland University. Brinks is a great vSAN customer but is doing an NSX session at the same time as the vSAN session so we are lucky to add Oakland University to the panel. I will moderate the session, ask the customers to describe their company, role, environment, and how they are using vSAN. General Motors will talk about their large VDI deployment. Unites States Federal Credit Union will discuss their use of vSAN in remote offices, VVols, and Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM). Rent-A-Center will discuss vSAN for management clusters, VDI, and the benefit of VxRail. Oakland University will discuss their vSAN stretched cluster, Data at Rest Encryption, and Dedupe/Compression. After each panelist does this, we’ll take questions from the audience.

Here’s a recording of last year’s session to give you an idea: https://youtu.be/x4ioatHqQOI 
On the panel we had Sanofi, Travelers, Sekisui Pharmaceutical, and Herbalife. The year before we had Stanley Black and Decker, Synergent Bank, M&T Bank, and Baystate Health. Both were great sessions and this year looks like it will be too.

Achieving a GDPR-Ready Architecture Leveraging VMware vSAN [HCI3452BU]
Wednesday, Aug 29, 12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.

When it comes to security in vSAN, most think Data at Rest Encryption and to make this all work you need a key management server. It’s tough to beat HyTrust for this. They offer the software for free and support for a small fee. But that’s not all they do. Check out this session to find out more. Dave Siles and I will discuss GDPR-Ready Architecture and how vSAN encryption can help.

Troubleshooting vSAN Networking Issues with Health Checks – vSAN Health Check and vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) Health Check

by pgkeilty, posted in VMware, VSAN, VxRail

Recently, one of my colleagues was working with a customer that was intermittently getting an error on the vSAN health check in vSAN 6.6.x indicating that “A few hosts were failing ping test – large packet ping test: vsan: mtu check (ping with large packet size)”. As reported by the customer the same cluster would sometimes pass all tests in vSAN Health, and other times report the error above.

The customer enabled the vSphere distributed switch (VDS) health check and ran it on the vSphere distributed switch that was supporting the cluster. The VDS health check immediately reported …

  • Mismatched VLAN trunks between a vSphere distributed switch and physical switch.
  • Mismatched MTU settings between physical network adapters, distributed switches, and physical switch ports.

The VDS health check also reported which uplinks across the hosts had these specific misconfiguration issues, so customer had something concrete to take to his networking team to resolve the problem.

I thought this was a good example of using these two tools together to identify a networking problem and providing evidence to help facilitate the resolution.