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Configuring per-VMDK IOPS reservations in vSphere 6.0

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One of the new features in vSphere 6.0 that was quickly mentioned at the end of Duncan Epping's What's New Storage DRS blog post is the ability to configure an IOPS reservation on a per-VMDK basis which is now integrated with both Storage IO Control (SIOC) and Storage DRS. As Duncan mentioned at the end of his article, this feature is only consumable through the vSphere API and given that, it may not be a feature that is widely known or used. This topic had recently surfaced in an internal thread on how to set the IOPS reservations and below are the details if you wish to leverage this new vSphere 6.0 storage platform capability.

To be able to use this new feature, there are two requirements:

  1. You need to set the IOPS reservation value on an individual VMDK which is under the StorageIOAllocationInfo property of a VMDK called, not surprisingly, reservation.
  2. All ESXi hosts mounting the Datastore must be running vSphere 6.0

To be clear, this reservation property has been around since vSphere 5.5, but had only had support for local datastores. In vSphere 6.0, shared datastores are now supported along with both SIOC and Storage DRS being aware.

To exercise the use of this vSphere API, I have created a simple PowerCLI script called configurePerVMDKIOPS.ps1 (works with both vSphere 5.x & 6.0) which you will need to edit to include your vCenter Server, the name of the VM you wish to set the IOPS reservation along with the VMDK label and IOPS value.

Here is an example output for configuring a VM named Photon with IOPS reservations of 2000 on Hard Disk 1:

configure-per-vmdk-iops-reservations
I have been told that in the future, the plan is to make this configurable available in the vSphere Web Client. Though, honestly why would anyone want to perform this change across multiple VMs by hand, when you can quickly and efficiently automate this across your environment with a simple script? 😉

Cloud Native Apps, Containers & Docker sessions at VMworld

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I just saw a nice list of VMworld sessions that was shared internally by Ben Corrie, an Engineer working in our Cloud Native Apps team at VMware on some of the VMworld sessions related to Cloud Native Apps, Containers & Docker. I figure I would share his list with a wider audience for those interested and I have also included session proposals by both VMware Employees as well as from our partners which you can find below.

I am personally excited for session 5229 - Docker and Fargo: Exploding the Linux Container Host which will be presented by both Ben & George Hicken if it gets accepted. I was fortunate enough to catch a demo of this internal project at our R&D Innovation Offsite (RADIO) last week and I think folks will be blown away with some of the work that has been done in this area. I can not say anymore other than to vote for this session and any others that you might be interested in! If there are other sessions, please let me know and I will update the list.

I had to also thrown in a shameless plug at the very bottom of this post on three of the sessions that I have submitted for VMworld this year. Hope you find them interesting to vote for and hope to see you all at VMworld!

VMware Submitted Sessions (14)

Session # Session Title
4590 Hypervisors vs. Containers - Wait That's the Wrong Question!
4600 An Interesting Application Software Based on Docker
4725 Scalable On-Demand Cloud Native Apps with Docker and Mesos
4767 Seven Things vSphere Admins Need to Know About Photon Lightwave and Containers
4853 Docker Containers on vSphere: Performance Deep Dive
4940 CIS Benchmark Compliance for Docker - Automated with VMware
5006 Monitoring Software Containers with vRealize Operations
5121 Containers as a Service with vRealize Automation and VMware Project Photon
5229 Docker and Fargo: Exploding the Linux Container Host
5266 Docker in the Real World: Tales Round the Campfire
5343 Rapid and Continuous Delivery Through Docker Container and VMware Cloud Technologies
5409 Migration of Docker Based Applications across Clouds
5627 How Do You Manage and Monetize the Docker Deployments as Containers Not VMs to Groups in Your Organization Using Your Existing vRealize Suite?
5860 Containers without Compromise: Providing Persistent Storage for Docker Containers using vSphere

Partner Submitted Sessions (8)

Session # Session Title
4742 Understanding Databases for Distributed Containerized Applications
5078 Back to the Future: What Current Container Trends Mean for the Future of Application Deployment
5321 Building Container Infrastructure for Enterprise Applications with Docker VMware Photon and vSphere
5494 TOSCA: Containers Microservices OpenStack and Orchestrating the Whole Symphony
5520 Containers on VMware Infrastructure
5907 Taming Containerized Workloads with Photon and Tectonic
6081 Are You Prepared to Contain the Container? Understand the Security and Compliance Considerations for Application Containers
6126 Containers VMs and Microservices Walk into a Bar.....

William Lam Submitted Sessions (3)

Session # Session Title
4528 vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Best Practices & Tips/Tricks
5106 Content Library
5278 VC Windows to VCSA Migration Fling Deep Dive

Extracting VID, DID & SVID from PCI devices in ESXi using vSphere API

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From time to time, you may need to collect some hardware related information such as PCI devices found within your ESXi hosts. In the past, you may have gone directly to the ESXi Shell running some of the legacy esxcfg-* commands for extracting things like the PCI device's Vendor ID (VID), Device ID (DID) and Sub Vendor ID (SVID) which can be used to correlate against VMware's HCL as seen in the screenshot below.

extract-pci-vid-did-svid-0
I personally try to stay out of the ESXi Shell if I can help it and prefer to retrieve these things using an API, such as the vSphere API. Historically, I too thought the VID, DID & SVID properties were only available within the ESXi Shell, but they are actually readily available in the vSphere API. You can find all PCI devices under the hardware.pciDevice property of an ESXi host and below are the three variables that map to these properties.

  • Vendor ID (VID) = vendorId
  • Device ID (DID) = deviceId
  • Sub Vendor ID (SVID) = subVendorId

To quickly demonstrate how you can extract this information using the vSphere API which can be done by connecting either directly to an ESXi host or by going to vCenter Server, I have created a simple PowerCLI script called queryHostPCIInfo.ps1.

Here is an example output of running the script against my Mac Mini and we can see details such as the device name, vendor and the respective VID, DID & SVID values.

extract-pci-vid-did-svid-1
If there are other properties which you still find yourself going directly to the ESXi Shell, please leave a comment as I know the PM's are interested in these information and is working hard to ensure that all these properties are available through our vSphere API.