ESXi – Page 134

How to quickly deploy CoreOS on ESXi?

07.25.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

There has been a tremendous amount of buzz lately regarding Docker, a platform that allows developers to easily build, deploy and manage Linux Containers. Docker can run on variety of Linux Distributions, one that has been quite popular lately is a new Linux Distribution called CoreOS.

CoreOS is actually a fork of Google's ChromeOS and was designed to run next generation workloads similar to those at Google and Facebook. A major benefit of CoreOS is the minimal footprint the base operating system consumes which allows for maximum resource utilization for the Container workloads.

Having heard so much about Docker and CoreOS, I figure this would be a great opportunity to explore and learn about a new technology which I always enjoy when I get the time. I know Duncan Epping has written an article on how to run CoreOS on VMware Fusion, but since I primarily work with vSphere, I wanted to run CoreOS on ESXi. The first place I went to was the CoreOS documentation and there is a section for VMware. After going through the instructions, I found the process to be quite manual and potentially requiring additional tools as a simple OVF/OVA for CoreOS did not exist.

I figured I could wrap the process in a very simple shell script that only required a couple of input parameters from the user based on their environment and the script would auto-magically handle the deployment. I created a shell script that would run on the ESXi Shell called deploy_coreos_on_esxi.sh

Note: The script assumes you can connect directly to the CoreOS website to download the zip directly onto the ESXi host.

There are three variables that you will need to edit prior to running the script:

DATASTORE_PATH - The full path to the Datastore to deploy CoreOS onto (e.g. /vmfs/volumes/datastore)
VM_NETWORK - The name of the vSphere Network to connect the CoreOS VM to
VM_NAME - The name of the CoreOS VM

Once you have finished editing the script, you just need to scp to your ESXi host and run the script using the following command:

./deploy_coreos_on_esxi.sh

Here is screenshot of running the script:

Once the script has completed, you should see a new CoreOS VM on your ESXi host and if you have DHCP, you should also see an associated IP Address in the VM Console:

Once the CoreOS VM is booted up, you use the SSH key that was included in the zip file, by default it is also extracted into the CoreOS VM directory. You can SSH into the VM by running the following command:

ssh -i insecure_ssh_key core@IP-ADDRESS-OF-COREOS-VM

Once logged in, we can run "docker images" to see a list of Containers. As you can see that there is only one and we can connect to that Container by running the "toolbox" command which will pull down the latest and then connect to that Container as seen in the screenshot below.

I was hoping that I could also get VMware Tools installed within the CoreOS VM, but I was not able to get SSH working within the Toolbox as stated in the Install Debugging Tools documentation. I may need to tinker around a bit more with CoreOS.

If you are interested in other methods of deploying CoreOS, be sure to check out CoreOS's documentation.

Additional Resources:

http://www.vreference.com/2014/06/09/deploy-coreos-into-your-esxi-lab/ - This was a great primer on CoreOS by Forbes Guthrie that I really enjoyed reading, highly recommend
http://gosddc.com/articles/dock-your-container-on-vmware-with-vagrant-and-docker/ - If you use Vagrant and would like to play with Docker, be sure to check out Fabio Rapposelli Vagrant vCloud Provider

Does VSAN work with Free ESXi?

07.22.2014 by William Lam // 8 Comments

I recently had to re-provision one of my VSAN lab environments using my recently shared ESXi 5.5 VSAN Kickstart. I usually specify a license key within the Kickstart so I do not have to license the ESXi host later. This actually got me wondering on whether VSAN would in fact work with Free ESXi aka vSphere Hypevisor? Being a curious person, I of course had to test this in the lab 🙂

Needless to say, if you want to properly evaluate or use VSAN in production, you should go through the supported method of using vCenter Server as it provides a simple and intuitive management interface for VSAN. More importantly, having the ability to create individual VM Storage Policies that can be applied on a per VMDK basis based on SLA's for your given application or Virtual Machine.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware and running ESXi without a VSAN license is against VMware's EULA.

Since we do not have a vCenter Server, we will need to be able to fully configure VSAN without it. Luckily, we know of a way to "bootstraping" VSAN onto an ESXi host without vCenter Server and I will be leveraging that blog post to test this scenario with Free ESXi.

Prerequisite:

3 ESXi 5.5 hosts already installed and licensed with vSphere Hypervisor (Free ESXi) License
SSH Enabled

Step 1 - SSH to the first ESXi host and run the following ESXCLI command to create a VSAN Cluster:

esxcli vsan cluster join -u $(python -c 'import uuid; print str(uuid.uuid4());')

Step 2 - Run the following ESXCLI command to make a note of the VSAN Cluster UUID (highlighted in green in the screenshot above) which will be needed later:

esxcli vsan cluster get

Step 3 - Enable VSAN Traffic for VMkernel interface you plan on using for VSAN traffic by running the following ESXCLI command:

esxcli vsan network ipv4 add -i vmk0

Step 4 - Run the following command to view a list of disks that are eligible for use with VSAN. You will need a minimum of 1xSSD and 1xMD

vdq -q

Step 5 - Using the information from vdq, we will now create our VSAN Disk Group which will contain the SSD/MD's to be used for VSAN. Use the following ESXCLI command and substituting in the SSD/MD Names (please refer to the screenshot above for an example):

esxcli vsan storage add -s [SSD] -d [MD]

Step 6 - To ensure you have properly configured a VSAN Disk Group, you can run the following ESXCLI command to confirm:

esxcli vsan storage list

At this point, we now have a single ESXi host configured with VSAN Datastore, we can also confirm this by running the following ESXCLI command:

esxcli storage filesystem list

Step 7 - Repeat Steps 3-6 on the remainder two ESXi hosts

Step 8 - Finally, we now need to join the remainder ESXi hosts to the VSAN Cluster. We will need the VSAN Cluster UUID that we recorded earlier and specify that in the following ESXCLI command on each of the remainder ESXi hosts:

esxcli vsan cluster join -u [VSAN-CLUSTER-UUID]

If we now login to all of our ESXi hosts using the vSphere C# Client, we will see a common VSAN Datastore that is shared among the three ESXi hosts. To prove that that VSAN is in fact working, we can create a Virtual Machine and ensure we can power it on as seen in the screenshot below. By default, VSAN has a "Default" policy which defines FTT (Number of host failures to tolerate) set to 1 and assuming you have at least 3 ESXi hosts, all Virtual Machines will be protected by default.

Even though you can run VSAN using Free ESXi and leveraging the default VM Storage Policy that is built into VSAN for protecting Virtual Machines, you are only exercising a tiny portion of the potential that VSAN can bring when consuming it through vCenter Server. As mentioned earlier, you will not have the ability to create specific VM Storage Policies and assign them based on the specific SLAs and be able to easily monitor their compliance and remediation. The management of VSAN Cluster for adding additional capacity or serviceability is also quite limited without vCenter Server, though it can be definitely be done it is much easier with just a couple of clicks in the vSphere Web Client or a simple API call.

ESXi 5.5 Kickstart script for setting up VSAN

07.21.2014 by William Lam // 12 Comments

In my lab, when I need to provision a new or rebuild an existing ESXi host, I still prefer to use the true and tried method of an unattended/scripted installation also known as Kickstart. Below is a handy ESXi 5.5 Kickstart that I have been using to setup a basic VSAN environment. I figure this might come in handy for anyone looking to automate their ESXi 5.5 deployment and include some of the VSAN configurations like creating a VSAN Disk Group or enabling VSAN Traffic type on a particular VMkernel interface. For more details about this Kickstart, refer to the bottom of the file where I break down the file in more detail.

[Read more...]