WilliamLam.com

Community stories of VMware & Apple OS X in Production: Part 4

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Company: AutoTrader.com
Product: VMware vSphere
Hardware: Apple Mac Mini

[William] - Hi Chris, good afternoon. I know we have chatted a few times on Twitter before but for the folks that do not know you, can you quickly introduce yourself and what you do?

[Chris] - My name is Chris Nakagaki and I work for Autotrader.com as Sr. Systems Engineer. My current role involves day-to-day operations of VMware vSphere products in addition to defining best practices around the virtual infrastructure. Not to mention, help drive automation in my organization. Occasionally, I'll post something useful on my tech.zsoldier.com blog.

[William] - You had sent me an email after I published the first community story around how VMware leverages Mac Mini’s. I hear you are doing something pretty cool with the Mac Mini’s as well for your organization? Could you share some details on how your organization is using VMware and Mac Minis?

[Chris] - A couple of our subsidiary companies, in this case (vAuto and AutoTrader.com) essentially needed OS X VM's for QA testing of iOS applications, and general Mac browser testing. Rather than delivering individual Mac Mini to every developer and/or VMware fusion, etc. vAuto first approached us and we came up with this idea of clustering some Mac Mini's. They wanted to run ESXi on them to host relatively small VM's that could be centrally managed and accessed from any number of developers and with the Apple EULA, this was the only option due to the restriction. Besides that, it was just a really cool idea since we're all Mac/Apple fans anyways

[William] - That’s awesome, never seen a customer come up with both the request and a solution at the same time 😉 Have you had any experiences running vSphere on the Mac Mini’s before? Any challenges you faced while exploring this solution?

[Chris] - Thankfully you (William Lam) had run into a lot of the problems for us already.  So it was really easy to setup using the custom ISO and VIB you created to put our little 'MacCloud' together. The other non-software aspect we ran into though was the fact that the Mac Mini's do not have an out of band management interface. So we are currently looking for some smart power supplies and/or iKVM so that we can actually place these in our 'real' datacenters.

[William] - Hey no worries, I rather be the guinea pig and get all the kinks out so customers like yourself can just enjoy the benefits of running vSphere and ESXi on Apple hardware! How large is the MacCloud right now and what is the current hardware and software configuration?

[Chris] - Our MacCloud is only 3 Mac Mini's right now as we're still kind of 'feeling' it out. But soon after vAuto started using it, the word got out and we setup some test systems for our AutoTrader.com developers. In addition, our client engineering group uses a tool called Casper to manage our Macs. He needed a Distribution Point, preferably a system that had AFP, so we set him up with one and he was able to use it to deliver updates/applications. And the I/O for VSAN is so good with the SSD's, it screams.

Each Mac Mini is the 'Server' version, i7@ 2.6GHz, 1 SSD (128GB), 1HDD (1TB) and 16GB memory using USB to boot into ESXI. For the software, we are currently using vSphere Enterprise Plus and the vCenter Server happens to be the VCSA. The MacCloud is also being monitored by vCOPs

Here is a picture of the front/back of the Mac Mini rack:

autotrader-mac-mini-1

autotrader-mac-mini-2
[William] - That’s amazing, it sounds like the environment is really satisfying your developers and I can see why word has spread. So, did I read that right? You are currently using VSAN on the Mac Mini’s!? How has the performance been and what made you decide to leverage VSAN?

[Chris] - The minute VSAN went into beta, that's all I could personally think about for my own home lab with the Mac Mini's. That just naturally translated when the business had a need and I could satisfy my curiosity in one fell swoop. So being that these workloads aren't heavy I/O, I haven't been all that concerned with it. The VM Storage Policies have been all left at default because I don't see a need to change right now.

My team and I are actively keeping a pulse on all the users of the VM's hosted on here though. vCOPs shows that everything is working efficiently, but we want to make sure that is translating to a good user experience. The Casper DP is one in particular that I'm curious about since the disk I/O profile on that one should be a bit more consistent.

[William] - That is really cool to see customers already leveraging VSAN for their production usage and great to hear the experiences has been solid so far. You mention the use of vCOPs for monitoring the VMs, are you also using vCOPS to monitor the underlying Mac Mini’s and how do you handle hardware issues?

[Chris] - Honestly, right now, we're just relying on the vCenter CIM service to tell us if it finds a hardware problem. The first obvious problem I have with that is I'm not so sure it would notice a hard drive failure. Like VMware, we'd probably just bring it into a local Apple store and have any components still under warranty replaced. 'Normally' we have SNMP traps sent from vCenter to HP BSM. Being that this is such a small environment with lots of questions, we simply use vCOPs to alert us of any unusual behavior or problems. Many of of our vCenter alarms are 'self-correcting' alarms.

[William] - It sounds like your MacCloud is quite mature with so many different capabilities. Any plans in the near term to expand, I can already see more developers asking for similar setup? Will you be increasing your Mac Mini VSAN Cluster or potentially create a new one?

[Chris] - Most likely yes. My hope is that Apple and VMware will see the value in these community initiatives to hopefully make a 'support' Mac Mini with some native 10Gb capabilities. In the meantime, I can only see this growing to some really awesome potential.

[William] - Awesome to hear! Well, I do not want to take up any more of your time but before we conclude. Is there any tips or recommendations you would offer other fellow vSphere Administrators looking to run vSphere on Mac Mini? Any words of wisdom that you can offer?

[Chris] - Download William's ISO, upload and install the VIB from local system. Remote VIB install doesn't work because of static line (might be specific to windows) and last but not least. TRY IT!

[William] - haha. Thanks for the plug!

If you are interested in sharing your story with the community (can be completely anonymous) on how you use VMware and Mac OS X in Production, you can reach out to me here.

 

Quick Tip - How to enable "remote" disk for Nested ESXi?

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I always love to hear about new tips and tricks from Internal VMware folks, especially ones that I can share with the community. The other day, my colleague Paudie O'Riordan had a pretty interesting problem that he was trying to solve pertaining to a re-production he was helping out with. After he found the solution, he thought I might find it interesting and he shared the details with me.

Paudie was looking for a quick way to force a disk to show up as "remote" versus "local" in a Nested ESXi VM during the installation process.

esxi-remote-disk-using-lsi-sas-0
The disk type will depend on how the disk was presented to the ESXi host, but sometimes even local devices may show up as remote, especially if the disk controller is not in pass-through mode. Instead of having to setup a complex iSCSI setup, Paudie found that if you selected LSI Logic SAS as the virtual SCSI Disk Controller for your Nested ESXi VM instead of the default LSI Logic Parallel, that automatically any disks placed on that controller will automatically show up as remote.

esxi-remote-disk-using-lsi-sas-1
This is definitely a handy tip you may want to bookmark, especially if you are looking to test any type of Kickstart configuration where you may be dealing with remote devices or practicing for your VCP/VCAP exams and playing with ESXCLI claim rules.

How to run Nested Mac OS X guest on ESXi VM on top VMware Fusion?

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You might be asking, why would anyone want to do this? Well, luckily this is not a "because you can" type of answer but was it was an interesting solution that one of our VMware Engineers (Darius) had shared with me after helping out on this VMTN Community forum thread.

The user was running VMware Fusion on his physical Mac OS X system and wanted to be able to test OS X Mavericks under ESXi. Not having a physical ESXi host to test with, the next best thing was to run a ESXi VM under VMware Fusion and then run the Mavericks guest on top of that.

Here is a quick diagram of the user setup:

nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion0
The issue with just simply doing this is that for a Mac OS X guest to properly run on ESXi, the underlying hardware must be Apple Hardware. The reason for this is not a technical challenges, but rather a legal one per Apple's EULA. The way in which ESXi detects that the underlying hardware is Apple is by checking whether Apple's SMC (System Management Controller) is available.

In the scenario above, the Nested ESXi VM is not automatically passing through the SMC from the physical Mac OS X system and hence the Mac OS X VM at the very top of the stack will not properly function. The solution that Darius found was to add the following two Advanced VM Settings (VMX) entries to the ESXi VM:

smc.present = "TRUE"
smbios.reflectHost = "TRUE"

This will allow the passing of the underlying SMC up into the Nested ESXi VM which will then allow Mac OS X guest VMs to properly function. We can also confirm this by check the Nested ESXi MOB by pointing a browser to the following URL: https://[ESXI-IP]/mob/?moid=ha-host&doPath=hardware

nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion3
If you did not add the two entries above, then the smcPresent property would show up as false. In our case, we did add the following two entries and we now run our Mac OS X Guest. Here are a couple of screenshots of performing this on my iMac at home running the same exact configuration:

nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion1nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion2
Thanks Darius for sharing this with me and the community! I am sure this will come in handy for anyone wanting to test Mac OS X guests under ESXi but do not have a physical ESXi host and can easily substitute using VMware Fusion.