ESXi – Page 115

ESXi 6.0 works OOTB for Apple Mac Mini & Mac Pro

02.06.2015 by William Lam // 146 Comments

Over the years, there have been various Apple issues that have required different hacks/tweaks to get a stock ESXi image to install on an Apple Mac Mini. Even though the only officially supported Apple platform for ESXi is the Apple Mac Pro, VMware Engineering, CPD and Hardware QE have been working hard to back porting as many of these "fixes/tweaks" to provide the best user experience possible for installing ESXi on non-supported Apple hardware. As you can imagine, the amount of work required to manage hardware on the official VMware HCL is no small task and then trying to back port non-supported platforms is even more challenging from a support standpoint.

The release of ESXi 6.0 is a significant release in my opinion as it contains the final few fixes that have plagued earlier version of the Mac Mini platform, especially starting with the Mac Mini 6,2 and greater models. I am please to announce that the stock ESXi 6.0 image now works on all Mac Mini platforms starting from 5,1 and newer as well as Mac Pro 6,1 platform and newer. There are no additional tweaks or custom ISOs that will be required for a fully functional ESXi installation with proper networking enabled. In fact, if you have a Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter connected to either a Mac Mini or Mac Pro, you will also notice that it is automatically recognized without any additional driver or tweaks to the driver map files.

Disclaimer: Running ESXi on an Apple Mac Mini is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk

One caveat that I would like to highlight is for the recent 2014 Mac Mini 7,1 or newer models where the SATA HDD is not automatically detected due to a change in the disk model made by Apple. Unfortunately, due to the late release of the 2014 Mac Mini, the required PCI ID to recognize the drive could not be added to the stock image of ESXi 6.0. Luckily, the resolution is quite easy and you can download and apply this custom VIB to get the SATA HDD recognized. I have been told that the plan is to get this fix in the next update/patch release so hopefully in the near future, no additional tweaks are required ... unless Apple decides to change something on us again 🙂

Here are screenshots of running ESXi 6.0 on both the Apple Mac Mini and Mac Pro:

What's New Whitepapers for vSphere 6.0 Platform, VSAN 6.0 & others

02.03.2015 by William Lam // 6 Comments

With the announcement vSphere 6.0, I am sure many of you are curious to learn more about the new features and capabilities in vSphere which includes a major update to Virtual SAN dubbed VSAN 6.0. From what I saw on Twitter yesterday, the blogosphere was on fire yesterday with so much content which was awesome but I also did notice quite a bit of incorrect information being posted. I suspect some of this information was based on earlier vSphere Beta's while others, I am really not sure where they got their information because it was not even mentioned in the Beta's. Remember, that not everything in the vSphere Beta will be released in the final product.

In any case, for the definitive source of What's New in vSphere 6.0, I would highly recommend everyone check out both new whitepapers for vSphere 6.0 Platform as well as VSAN 6.0 as they will contain all the details of what will be available at GA. Below are the direct links for the whitepapers as I did not find it on the Technical Whitepapers section of VMware.com which I suspect is still being updated.

Why is my VSAN Component maximum showing less than 3000?

01.28.2015 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

This is a question that I have seen come up on several occasions in both the VMTN Community forums as well as in our internal Socialcast group. I have not seen anyone blog about this topic yet and figure I would share the answer since this was a question I had asked myself when I had initially setup VSAN. If you are not familiar with VSAN Components, I highly recommend you check out Cormac Hogan's blog article VSAN Part 4: Understanding Objects and Components.

In vSphere 5.5 Update 1, the maximum number of supported components for VSAN is 3000 which is a per ESXi host maximum. What some folks are noticing when they run the RVC vsan.check_limits command on their VSAN Cluster, they are finding out that the maximum is coming up much lower as seen in the example below.

/localhost/VSAN-Datacenter/computers> vsan.check_limits VSAN-Cluster/
2015-01-28 15:34:25 +0000: Gathering stats from all hosts ...
2015-01-28 15:34:27 +0000: Gathering disks info ...
+--------------------------------+-------------------+-------------------------------------------+
| Host                           | RDT               | Disks                                     |
+--------------------------------+-------------------+-------------------------------------------+
| vesxi55-3.primp-industries.com | Assocs: 30/20000  | Components: 8/750                         |
|                                | Sockets: 17/10000 | naa.6000c2932c3f51f04e4cd395f4a11752: 8%  |
|                                | Clients: 3        | naa.6000c294f6496a99ad756857b9b06f01: 0%  |
|                                | Owners: 5         |                                           |
| vesxi55-2.primp-industries.com | Assocs: 10/20000  | Components: 8/750                         |
|                                | Sockets: 13/10000 | naa.6000c294bde5987d60398e0305978b00: 9%  |
|                                | Clients: 0        | naa.6000c292a964255b82410099360a9b27: 0%  |
|                                | Owners: 0         |                                           |
| vesxi55-1.primp-industries.com | Assocs: 24/20000  | Components: 8/750                         |
|                                | Sockets: 15/10000 | naa.6000c298b69006b820e367b5fde97cbf: 11% |
|                                | Clients: 3        | naa.6000c29db3f272cfb7fb4d08bffad3ab: 0%  |
|                                | Owners: 3         |                                           |
+--------------------------------+-------------------+-------------------------------------------+

The reason for this is actually due to the amount of physical memory available to each ESXi host. If you are running VSAN in a Nested ESXi environment like I am in the example above, I only have 8GB of memory configured for each ESXi host. The number of supported VSAN Components will definitely differ from an actual physical host with more memory and the nice thing about vsan.check_limits command is that it is dynamic in nature based on the actual available resources. Funny enough, the majority of the questions actually came from folks who ran VSAN in a Nested Environment, so this would explain why this question keeps popping up.

If I run the same RVC command on an environment where VSAN was running on real hardware with a decent amount of memory which most modern systems these days have, then I can see the VSAN Component maximum is properly displaying the 3000 limit as expected in the example below.

/localhost/datacenter01/computers> vsan.check_limits vsan-cluster01/
2015-01-28 15:28:47 +0000: Querying limit stats from all hosts ...
2015-01-28 15:28:49 +0000: Fetching VSAN disk info from esx021.vmwcs.com (may take a moment) ...
2015-01-28 15:28:49 +0000: Fetching VSAN disk info from esx022.vmwcs.com (may take a moment) ...
2015-01-28 15:28:49 +0000: Fetching VSAN disk info from esx024.vmwcs.com (may take a moment) ...
2015-01-28 15:28:51 +0000: Done fetching VSAN disk infos
+---------------------------+--------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Host                      | RDT                | Disks                                                                           |
+---------------------------+--------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| esx021.vmwcs.com          | Assocs: 223/45000  | Components: 97/3000                                                             |
|                           | Sockets: 132/10000 | t10.ATA_____WDC_WD1002FAEX2D00Z3A0________________________WD2DWCATRC061926: 18% |
|                           | Clients: 14        | t10.ATA_____KINGSTON_SH103S3480G__________________00_50026B7226017C69____: 0%   |
|                           | Owners: 29         |                                                                                 |
| esx022.vmwcs.com          | Assocs: 252/45000  | Components: 96/3000                                                             |
|                           | Sockets: 143/10000 | t10.ATA_____KINGSTON_SH103S3480G__________________00_50026B7226017CA2____: 0%   |
|                           | Clients: 14        | t10.ATA_____WDC_WD1002FAEX2D00Z3A0________________________WD2DWCATRC050466: 19% |
|                           | Owners: 38         |                                                                                 |
| esx024.vmwcs.com          | Assocs: 197/45000  | Components: 96/3000                                                             |
|                           | Sockets: 122/10000 | t10.ATA_____ST2000DL0032D9VT166__________________________________5YD73PRP: 8%   |
|                           | Clients: 17        | t10.ATA_____KINGSTON_SH103S3480G__________________00_50026B7226017C5B____: 0%   |
|                           | Owners: 22         |                                                                                 |
+---------------------------+--------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The lesson here is that even though I am a huge supporter of using Nested ESXi to learn about new products, features and how they work from a functional perspective, there is no amount of Nested ESXi testing that can ever replace actual testing of real hardware.