A fellow colleague was having some problems with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) CLI Installer when using the vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) bootstrap method, which automatically the configures vSAN ESA on a physical ESXi host before deploying the VCSA on top of the vSAN ESA Datastore.
Whether he manually downloaded the vSAN JSON HCL or generated his own custom vSAN ESA HCL, the VCSA Installer would fail with the following error:
Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
When creating a new vSAN File Share, which is powered by vSAN File Services, additional network access controls (no access, allow access from any IP or custom) can be configured.
To view the configured network permissions, users must expand each file share to get the relevant information. For those interesting in automating the retrieval of this information for reporting and/or compliance purposes, you can use the vSAN Management API and specifically the vSAN queryFileShares() API.
The vSAN File Share API can also be consumed through PowerCLI using the Get-VsanFileShare cmdlet, but the network permission configuration is not part of the default output which might lead users to believe this information is not available.
While catching up on post-Explore email, I received a question from a customer who has a large number of vSAN deployments spanning their ROBO environment. In one of their environment, they had some physical congestion issue that caused some problems for their vSAN stretched cluster and they were looking for a way to monitor the vSAN congestion health, which is available as part of vSAN Health.
Since this information is available as part of vSAN Health, we can certainly leverage the vSAN Health API to retrieve this information programmatically but we can also look at using the PowerCLI Test-VsanClusterHealth cmdlet to get this information in a quicker manner for administrators.