VRealize Log Insight

I ran into this problem at a customer site where all the Log Insight nodes were changed due to some IP address conflicts. I think the problem occurred because the IP addresses were all changed and the VMs shut down, without time for the application to update the node IPs.

The symptoms:

• The web interface was down, a netstat -ano | grep -i “443” showed the service was listening
• _service loginsight status|restart|stop|start _hung and then timed out on the Master node
• The loginsight service was not running on the Worker nodes
• /var/log/loginsight/runtime.log contains warning messages about “Cassandra cluster not ready yet”

• Running /usr/lib/loginsight/application/lib/apache-cassandra-*/bin/nodetool status showed the two data nodes down (DN) and used the old IP address

All of the nodes were up with their new IP addresses, however Cassandra on the Master node was still looking for the old IP addresses for the Worker nodes. The Worker nodes were in a similar state, knowing their own new IP addresses but not being able to update the Master node because they didn’t have the Master node’s new IP address.

vRealize Log Insight 2.5 improves on the clustering in previous versions with an Integrated Load Balancer (ILB) which allows you to distribute load across your cluster of Log Insight instances without actually needing an external load balancer. The advantage of this over an external load balancer is that the source IP is maintained which allows for easier analysis.

The minimum number of nodes in a cluster is three, the first node becomes the Master node and the other two become Worker nodes. The maximum number of nodes supported is six, though acording to Mr Log Insight himself, Steve Flanders , the hard limit is more:

With the release of vCenter Log Insight Public Beta ( http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vcenter/vcenter-log-insight ) I thought I’d strike while the iron is hot and run through the installation and configuration.

Deploying the OVF

This is such a bread and butter task that it doesn’t require more than a few words – it’s definitely worth looking at the Sizing PDF before you deploy ( VMware-vCenter-Log-Insight-1.0-Beta-Virtual-Appliance-Sizing.pdf ) as it’s not small even for a test installation. If you’re using less than the recommended 8GB RAM there are additional steps to change the heap size for performance.