DefinIT

Book Review: VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive

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The Host Resources Deep Dive book by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort has been one of the most widely anticipated books in the VMware community – previous deep dive books by Frank (co-authored with Duncan Epping), tantalising blog posts and captivating presentations have whet the appetite for the last year or so. Having sat through some of these presentations at VMUGs and VMworld I can tell you the depth and understanding that the authors bring to the table is immense.

I have not rushed to write a review of this book for two reasons, firstly I wanted to do it justice, and that meant that I needed to read it properly. The second reason is that this is a big book with well over 560 pages of content, and that requires some time!

Not a light read…

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PowerShell: Deploying vCenter High Availability in Advanced Mode

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With the release of vSphere 6.5, VMware upped the game for vCenter High Availability (vCHA) and introduced an active/passive/witness cluster setup to provide a failover cluster for vCenter Server Appliances. The diagram below shows the architecture of the solution.

Deploying vCHA can be done in two modes – “Basic” and “Advanced”. You can use Basic mode if the vCenter you want to be HA is managing the hosts it resides on – in this scenario the wizard configures your vCenter and deploys the Passive and Witness nodes for you. If you have a management cluster for your vCenter Server, or you are deploying a nested environment, you need to use the advanced mode – in this scenario you must configure your active node, deploy clones for the passive and witness nodes, then enable the configuration.

The ever-there-first William Lam has written an excellent PowerShell module for vCHA in Basic mode, which gave me a massive head start when looking at the code for Advanced mode. I will hopefully contributing part of my code to this module to extend it.

For those who just want the script, check out my GitHub repository – HA vCenter Deploy [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

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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!

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vRA7.2 and vSphere Integrated Containers

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One of the cool new features released with vRealize Automation 7.2 was the integration of VMware Admiral (container management) into the product, and recently VMware made version 1 of vSphere Integrated Containers generally available (GA), so I thought it was time I started playing around with the two.

In this article I’m going to cover deploying VIC to my vSphere environment and then adding that host to the vRA 7.2 container management.

Deploying vSphere Integrated Containers

VIC is deployed using a command line interface, which deploys a vApp and a container host VM onto your ESXi host or vSphere cluster. There are a LOT of different ways to configure VIC so I strongly suggest you read and digest the VIC Installation Guide. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to deploy as basic a setup as I can figure out. [Read more…]