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Re: Host is in a VSAN enabled cluster but does not have VSAN service enabled

03.18.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I recently noticed a couple of people hitting a warning message when configuring VSAN and specifically when running VSAN in a Nested ESXi environment (which is not officially supported by VMware). The warning message is displayed on the summary page of the ESXi host which states the following:

Host is in a VSAN enabled cluster but does not have VSAN service enabled

vsan-minimal-memory
The reason you are seeing this issue is related to the amount of memory you have allocated for your Nested ESXi VM. During the VSAN Beta, the minimal amount of memory was 4GB but it looks like that has changed to 5GB with the GA of vSphere 5.5 Update 1 last week. I know we could have done better job with the error message and communicate the actual underlying issue (will ensure we have an FR filed for this).

However, the fix is quite simple, just shutdown your Nested ESXi VM and then change it to 5GB and this message will go away. It is also worth noting that as you increase the number of disks and disk groups in your ESXi hosts, there will be an increase in memory. I would highly recommend you take a look at the official VSAN Design & Sizing guide to properly size out your real VSAN environments.

For basic functional testing and education of VSAN (not including running additional VMs), running a Nested ESXi VM with 5GB will be sufficient. You can also take a look at the my VSAN Nested ESXi OVF template which can just download and install ESXi 5.5 Update 1 without any issues.

Categories // Nested Virtualization, VSAN, vSphere 5.5 Tags // nested virtualization, VSAN, vSphere 5.5

Extending RVC to support renaming VM Storage Policies

03.18.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

I was recently using RVC (Ruby vSphere Console) to setup one of my VSAN lab environments and I had noticed that in the SPBM namespace, that you could create and delete a VM Storage Policy, but you could not rename an existing one. The great thing about RVC is that it is very extensible and I thought it would be useful to have a spbm.profile_rename command, so I decided to build it!

The management of VM Storage Policies is performed through the SPBM API and there is a method called PbmUpdate() which allows you to rename an existing VM Storage Policy. In my environment, I exclusively use the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) and in the /root directory, you should see a .rvc directory. To extend the SPBM namepace, you just need to create a new file called spbm.rb which should contain the following snippet of code:

opts :profile_rename do
  summary "Rename a VM Storage Profile"
  arg :profile, nil, :lookup => RbVmomi::PBM::PbmCapabilityProfile
  arg :name, "New name", :type => :string
end

def profile_rename profile, name
  _catch_spbm_resets(nil) do
    pbm = profile.instance_variable_get(:@connection)
    pm = pbm.serviceContent.profileManager
    spec = PBM::PbmCapabilityProfileUpdateSpec(
      :name => name,
    )
    pm.PbmUpdate(:profileId => profile.profileId, :updateSpec => spec)
  end
end

Once you have saved the file, you can now connect to RVC and you should see a new command called spbm.profile_rename which takes an existing VM Storage Policy and the new name of the policy.

Here is an example of what that would look like where I have a VM Storage Policy called "Platinum" and I want to rename it to "Adamantium":

spbm.profile_rename localhost/Datacenter/storage/vmprofiles/Platinum/ Adamantium

Categories // VSAN, vSphere Tags // rvc, spbm, vm storage policy, vm storage profile

Exploring VSAN APIs Part 5 – VSAN Host Status

03.17.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Another useful bit of information from a troubleshooting perspective is to be able to quickly get summary of all your ESXi hosts participating in a VSAN cluster. Critical information such as the health, state, VSAN Node/Cluster UUID for each ESXi host can be queried through the vsanSystem using the QueryHostStatus() vSphere API method. To demonstrate this simple operation, I have created a vSphere SDK for Perl sample script called vsanHostDiskMapping.pl.

Disclaimer:  These scripts are provided for informational and educational purposes only. It should be thoroughly tested before attempting to use in a production environment.

To show the ESXi host status, you will need to specify a vSphere Cluster running VSAN and use the following command:

./vsanHostStatus.pl --server vcenter55-1.primp-industries.com --username root --cluster VSAN-Cluster

vsan-host-status
As you can see this is an easy way to quickly get the health of ESXi host participating in the VSAN cluster.

  1. Exploring VSAN APIs Part 1 – Enable VSAN Cluster
  2. Exploring VSAN APIs Part 2 – Query available SSDs
  3. Exploring VSAN APIs Part 3 – Enable VSAN Traffic Type
  4. Exploring VSAN APIs Part 4 – VSAN Disk Mappings
  5. Exploring VSAN APIs Part 5 – VSAN Host Status
  6. Exploring VSAN APIs Part 6 – Modifying Virtual Machine VM Storage Policy
  7. Exploring VSAN APIs Part 7 – VSAN Datastore Folder Management
  8. Exploring VSAN APIs Part 8 – Maintenance Mode
  9. Exploring VSAN APIs Part 9 – VSAN Component count
  10. Exploring VSAN APIs Part 10 – VSAN Disk Health

Categories // VSAN, vSphere, vSphere 5.5 Tags // VSAN, vSphere 5.5, vSphere API

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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