About

Daniel Barnes — Fort Worth, Texas.

vsanpro is a working notebook from the support seat. Long-form troubleshooting and design analysis for VMware vSAN, ESXi, and VMware Cloud Foundation — the layer where the architecture meets the logs. No news, no release churn, no how-to filler. If it's published here, it broke somewhere first, or it was built to answer a question a ticket asked.

I'm a Technical Support Engineer in the VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom, customer-facing on vSAN, ESXi, and VCF: storage, HCI, and the troubleshooting that comes with both. I started May 7, 2018, not knowing a single Linux command. The lab and the tickets fixed that. The job is troubleshooting first; everything else can be learned after that.

The write-ups come from that work and from my own lab — a 3-host vSAN ESA cluster on ESXi 9.1 that runs my house and my experiments. Anything drawn from customer work is scrubbed to the pattern: symptoms, physics, fix. No customer data, no internal detail, ever.