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Additional steps required to completely disable VSAN on ESXi host

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Something that I had noticed while working with VSAN in my lab is that when you disable VSAN on your vSphere Cluster, the disks that were used for VSAN in each of the ESXi hosts were no longer available for use afterwards. If you want to use one of the disks for creating a regular VMFS volume or even use it for for vSphere Flash Read Cache, the disks would not show up as an available device. The reason this is occurring is that the disks still contains a VSAN partition and this is not automatically removed when disabling VSAN.

You can view the partition details by using the partedUtil and specifying the "getptbl" option and the device.

Now I could use partedUtil to clear the partition, but there is actually a nice ESXCLI command that can be used to remove the disks used in a VSAN disk group and this will automatically clear the VSAN partition. The ESXCLI command is:

esxcli vsan storage remove -s [SSD-DEVICE-ID]

When I tried to run the command, I was surprised to get the following error message:

Unable to remove device: Can not destroy disk group for SSD naa.6000c29c581358c23dcd2ca6284eec79 : storage auto claim mode is enabled

It turns out when you use "Automatic" claiming mode when enabling VSAN on your vSphere Cluster, that configuration is left enabled on the ESXi host even when disabling VSAN. This then prevents you from destroying the disk group. So there is an extra step required if you choose automatic mode and you will need to run the following ESXCLI command to disable it:

esxcli vsan storage automode set --enabled false

If you are not sure, you can always perform a "get" operation to check whether automatic claim mode is enabled. Once that has been disabled, you will now be able to destroy the diskgroup by running the original command above:

The remove operation only requires the SSD device front-ending the VSAN disk group and you can identify the SSD by running "esxcli vsan storage list". I did find it odd that disabling VSAN in your vSphere Cluster did not completely disable the automatic mode on the ESXi host and I have already filed a bug request to get that fix.

ESXi Simple Web (aka less ghetto webAccess)

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Do you remember webAccess for those of you who were fortunate enough to have worked with classic ESX? I do and I personally have found that feature in the past to be very useful especially when you need to perform a quick VM power operation and you just have access to a web browser. Recently, one of my readers, Wei Kin Huang left a comment on my blog about a very cool solution that he built called ESXi Simple Web which is based off of some earlier work I did with a VMware Fling called Ops Panel for ESX for which I created a Ghetto webAccess for ESXi.

In his own words, ESXi Simple Web provides the following:

Basic controls straight from the esxi host in the browser

This allows you to run basic operations against the ESXi MOB api from a simple web interface straight from the ESXi host without the need for the vCenter web client.

Inspired by virtuallyGhetto's Ghetto webAccess for ESXi

Wei's ESXi Simple Web definitely looks prettier and from what I can tell, it looks to be using Bootstrap, a popular web front-end framework for the UI. The web interface talks to the vSphere MOB which basically communicates to the vSphere API for providing the summary details and basic VM operations.

You can try out ESXi Simple Web by downloading the latest version over on his Github repo. Once downloaded, you just need to extract the content and SCP the "web" directory over to the ESXi host under /usr/lib/vmware/hostd/docroot

Here are a couple more screenshots of ESXi Simple Web running on my Apple Mac Mini with ESXi 5.5:

There is a Virtual Machines tab that you can drill down and get some information about your VMs and perform basic power on/off operations.

You can also drill down into an individual VM and get a nice thumbnail of the VM console as well as additional configurations for that VM.

If you are interested in adding additional functionality, you can contribute by sending a pull requests to esxi-simple-web Github project.

You no longer can install vSphere C# Client on Windows Domain Controller in vSphere 5.5

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In the last couple of days I have noticed several folks comment on a new check that has been put in place in vSphere 5.5 which prevents a user from installing the vSphere C# Client onto a Windows Domain Controller system. If you try to install the vSphere C# Client on a Domain Controller system, you will get the following error message:

It is generally not recommended to install additional software on a Windows Domain Controller and I suspect this check was put in place to deter users from installing additional software, including VMware software onto a Domain Controller system. However, for a development environment or home lab, you may want to consolidate multiple applications onto a single system and help reduce the number of Windows systems that you may need to deploy. Luckily there is a way to by-pass this check and I am actually glad one exists as this is something I will need while building out some of internal labs.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

To by-pass the check, you will need to launch the vSphere C# Client install from the command-line and pass in the following arguments:

VMware-viclient.exe /v "SKIP_OS_CHECKS=1"

Now the installer should allow you to proceed with the vSphere C# Client installation.