VSAN – DefinIT

Simon’s #VMworld 2017: Sunday and Monday

12/09/2017 by Simon Leave a Comment

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Sunday

Arriving in early on Sunday as the local flight choices are more limited from Bristol than perhaps a larger Airport, very fortunate to have a hotel so close to the VMworld venue, perhaps not so great for the evening activities but I am happy with it this way around.

Other than registration (4pm-8pm) and hopefully catching up with a few folk who have also arrived early.

In the evening I had the pleasure to meet many awesome people from the vCommunity.

My current focus has been on vRA so it was great to meet some well known and knowledgable.

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Sam’s #VMworld 2017: vSAN Specialist and VMware {Code} Hackathon

12/09/2017 by Sam Leave a Comment

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VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist Exam

I always like to take a discounted exam at VMworld, this year I opted for the VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist exam, which was released a few weeks ago. Having delivered quite a few vSAN based solutions over the last few years, I was fairly confident in the blueprint. I am pleased to say that I passed the exam with a score of 422, way higher than I expected! I thought the exam itself was fair, and covered and tested the basics of vSAN well. You definitely need to know the supported architectures and how storage policies effect and apply to the data on vSAN.

You can check out my new badge on Acclaim

VMware Code Hackathon

Having taken part and thoroughly enjoyed last year’s hackathon at VMworld Las Vegas, I was definitely keen to get involved with the event this year. When I signed up there were no teams that took my fancy, so I created my own based on PowerCLI and some of my pod deployment scripts.

I was joined by some really good guys who all put in a serious amount of work in the short time we had – most importantly we had a great time and learned a lot! We managed to get a mostly working deployment of vROps, a HTML5 interface for the script config and the beginnings of the PowerShell required to deploy OVF templates from the vSphere Content Library – the content library script is available on my GitHub account. I’m hoping to continue working on it to develop a module to contribute to the PowerCLI script examples.

#vSAN Cache Performance Dashboard in #vROps

01/02/2017 by Simon Leave a Comment

I have recently been able to get vSAN properly up and running in my lab and took a look at the OOTB Dashboards that come with the MPSD (Management Pack for Storage Devices).

As I have a hybrid build (I know many have All Flash Arrays) I was interested in how hard my Flash Cache was working so I built a dashboard purely focused on this aspect of the vSAN product.

It is a simple dashboard but has what I think is useful information.

You can download it here

Feedback and questions very welcome.

vRealize Orchestrator Workflow: shutdownVSANCluster

30/12/2016 by Sam 1 Comment

vRealize Orchestrator My 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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vSphere Web Client – VSAN is Turned Off – Edit button disappears

16/09/2016 by Sam Leave a Comment

I ran into a strange one with my lab today where the previously working VSAN cluster couldn’t be enabled. Symptoms included:

The button to enable VSAN was missing from vSphere Web Client
vsphere_client_virgo.log had the following error:

[2016-09-16T14:49:03.473Z] [ERROR] http-bio-9090-exec-18 70001918 100023 200008 com.vmware.vise.data.query.impl.DataServiceImpl Error occurred while executing query:
QuerySpec
QueryName: dam-auto-generated: ConfigureVsanActionResolver:dr-57
ResourceSpec
Constraint: ObjectIdentityConstraint
TargetType: ClusterComputeResource
Target: ManagedObjectReference: type = ClusterComputeResource, value = domain-c481, serverGuid = a44e7d15-e63f-46c2-a1aa-b9b1cbf972be

I was able to enable VSAN on the cluster using rvc commands

SSH to VCSA
Enable bash shell
rvc administrator@vshere.local@locahost
vsan.enable_vsan_on_cluster /localhost/<datacenter name>/computers/<cluster name>

Following the enabling of VSAN on the cluster, I was still getting errors:

“Unable to load VSAN configuration” when viewing the VSAN configuration for the cluster in the vSphere Web Client
“HTTP400 Error” when viewing the cluster summary tab, on the VSAN health widget

The HTTP400 Error led me to the following KB VMware Virtual SAN 6.x health plug-in fails to load with the error: Unexpected status code: 400 (2133384), following the resolution in this KB resolved the issue.

It seems that, yet again, VMware’s certificate tooling does not replace a key certificate, and this is the root cause of the problem. When I deployed the VCSA, I configured the PSC as a subordinate Certificate Authority and followed the documented procedure to replace the certificates. Clearly this one was missed!