DefinIT

Alexa, turn on my workload cluster

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Like many other geeks out there, I received an Amazon Echo device this Christmas, and whether it’s a fad or not, I’ve spent a few happy hours setting up my Hue lights and some other automation. The room in the house with the most automation is my office – the novelty may wear off, but walking in each morning and saying “Alexa, turn on my office” and having everything wake up for me is really cool.

I already have a vRealize Orchestrator workflow to shutdown my workload cluster. What I want to do is trigger that by a voice command from Alexa. [Read more…]

Getting started with vRealize Log Insight 4.3 for vRealize Automation 7

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In this humble consultant’s opinion, Log Insight is one of the most useful tools in the administrator’s tool belt for troubleshooting vRealize Automation. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to help troubleshoot an issue that, when asked, people don’t know which log they should be looking at. The simple fact is that vRealize Automation has a lot of log files. Correlating these log sources to provide an overall picture is a painful, manual process – unless you have Log Insight!

Installing the Content Packs

In order to get the full picture of what’s going on during a vRA deployment you will likely need to correlate logs from vRA, vRO and NSX. Installing and configuring these is pretty easy.

I am going to assume the vSphere integration has already been configured, and all ESXi hosts are forwarding their logs to Log Insight already. [Read more…]

Lab notes: Upgrading vSphere 6.0 and NSX 6.2 to vSphere 6.5a and NSX 6.3

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I’ve been holding off upgrading my lab to vSphere 6.5  because NSX 6.2.x doesn’t support it. With the release of NSX 6.3 and vSphere 6.5a, I can now upgrade.

The sequence of the upgrade is slightly different to the generic one published by VMware because vSphere 6.5 isn’t supported with NSX 6.2. If follows that I need to upgrade NSX to 6.3 (which supports vSphere 6.0u2) before I can upgrade vSphere to 6.5a.

  1. Upgrade NSX Manager
  2. Upgrade NSX Controllers
  3. Upgrade NSX Host Clusters
  4. Update VXLAN port
  5. Upgrade NSX Edges
  6. Run Migration Assistant on VUM server
  7. Upgrade Platform Services Controller
  8. Upgrade vCenter Server Appliance
  9. Upgrade ESXi Hosts
  10. Upgrade VM Hardware and Tools

[Read more…]

Deploying ECMP with NSX for a Provider Logical Router

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Equal Cost Multipathing (ECMP), for the vSphere admin, is ability to create routes with an equal cost, which allows multiple paths to the same network to be created and traffic can be distributed over those paths. This is good for a couple of reasons – firstly is availability. If we were to lose a host, and an NSX Edge, the route will time out quicker than NSX Edge High Availability – thus providing higher availability for our network traffic. Then second reason is throughput – each NSX Edge is capable of ~10Gbps throughput, but with ECMP we can have multiple NSX Edges (up to 8) providing 10Gbps each – that’s a significant performance boost.

Below I’ve mapped out what I want to build in my lab – it’s a simplification of a design I’ve used for some Service Provider customers (and you’ll see similar in the vCloud Architecture Toolkit documentation from VMware).

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vRealize Orchestrator Workflow: shutdownVSANCluster

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vRealize OrchestratorMy vSphere lab is split into two halves – a low power management cluster, powered by 3 Intel NUCs, and a more hefty workload cluster powered by a Dell C6100 chassis with 3 nodes. The workload servers are noisy and power hungry so they tend to be powered off when I am not using them, and since they live in my garage, I power them on and off remotely.

To automate the process, I wanted to write an Orchestrator workflow (vRO sits on my management cluster and is therefore always on) that could safely and robustly shut down the workload cluster. There were some design considerations:

  • Something to do with the C6100 IPMI implementation and the ESXi driver does not like being woken from standby mode. It’s annoying, but not the end of the world – I can use impitool to power the hosts on from shutdown. If you want to use host standby, there’s a hostStandby and hostExitStandby workflow in the package on github.
  • I run VSAN on the cluster, so I need to enter maintenance mode without evacuating the data (which would take a long time and be pointless).
  • All the running VMs on the cluster should be shut down before the hosts attempt to go into maintenance mode.
  • I want a “what if” option, to see what the workflow would do if I ran it, without actually executing the shutdown – it’s largely for development purposes, but the power down/power on cycle takes a good half hour and I don’t want to waste time on a typo!

[Read more…]