Home Lab – Page 52

Thunderbolt Storage for ESXi

01.21.2015 by William Lam // 47 Comments

A question that I frequently receive is whether ESXi supports Thunderbolt-based storage devices. This is especially interesting for folks running ESXi on an Apple Mac Mini due to the limited number of IO connections the Mac Minis' have. If you look on VMware's HCL, you will not find any supported Thunderbolt Storage devices nor are there any that are being actively tested with ESXi, at least as far as I know.

Having said that, generally speaking from an ESXi host point of view, the Thunderbolt interface is just seen as an extended PCIe bus. This means that whatever storage device is connected on the other end can work with ESXi as long as there is a driver in ESXi that can communicate with that devices. This is analogous to having a RAID card and having the proper device driver on ESXi to see its storage.

Even though VMware is not actively testing Thunderbolt-based storage devices, there are a few folks out in the community who have and have been successful. I wanted to share these stories with the community for those that might be interested in this topic and hopefully others who have had similar success can also share more details about their setup.

UPDATE (09/12/16) - ESXi Thunderbolt Driver to Fibre Channel Storage from ATTO

Disclaimer: All solutions listed below are from the community and decisions to purchase based on these solutions will be at your own risk. I hold no responsibility if the listed solutions do not work for whatever reason.

Solution #1 - Pegaus R6 Thunderbolt Storage Enclosure

This was the first Thunderbolt storage device that I had ever seen confirmed publicly to work with ESXi after installing a STEX driver VIB. You can find more details here.

Solution #2 - Sonnet Echo Express III-R Rackmount Thunderbolt 2 Expansion Chassis & RacMac Mini Enclosure

This next solution was recently shared with me from Marc Huppert who has recently expanded his home lab. Marc combined a Thunderbolt expansion chassis with a Mac Mini chassis to exposed Fibre Channel storage to his Mac Minis. You can find more details here.

Solution #3 - xMac Mini Server Enclosure

I came across this solution while searching online which also uses another Mac Mini Thunderbolt expansion chassis connected to Fibre Channel based storage. You can find more details here.

Solution #4 - Sonnet xMac Pro Server Enclosure

Thanks to Joshua for sharing his solution. You can find more details in the comments here.

Solution #5 - LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt drives

Thanks to Philip for sharing his solution. You can find more details in the comments here.

Solution #6 - ARC-8050T2 Thunderbolt 2 RAID

Thanks to Jason for sharing his solution. You can find more details in the comments here.

Solution #7 - Another Sonnet xMac Pro Server Enclosure + EMC VNX

Thanks to Johann for sharing his solution. You can find more details here.

Solution #8 - LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 with 2013 Mac Pro w/ESXi 6.0

Thanks to Thomas for sharing his solution. You can find more details here.

Solution #9 - Sonnet Echo Express III with Mac Pro 6,1 and ATTO ExpressSAS H680 w/ESXi 6.0

Thanks to Grasshopper for sharing details here and here.

Solution #10 - OWC ThunderBay 4 RAID 4-Bay External Drive w/Dual Thunderbolt 2

Thanks to Gregg Green for sharing his use of the Thunderbay with Mac Mini 2012

If there are other Thunderbolt-based storage devices that you or others have had success with ESXi, feel free to leave a comment with details and I will add it to the post. If there are any Thunderbolt storage device vendors that would like to send me a demo unit, I would be more than happy to give the system a test to see if it works with ESXi 🙂

A killer custom Apple Mac Mini setup running VSAN

10.21.2014 by William Lam // 12 Comments

*** This is a guest blog post from Peter Bjork ***

The first time I was briefed on VMware VSAN, I fell in love. I finally knew how I would build my Home Lab.

Let me first introduce myself, my name is Peter Björk and I work at VMware as Lead Specialist within the EMEA EUC Practice. I fortunately have the opportunity to limit my focus on a very few products and truly specialize in these. I cover two products; VMware ThinApp and VMware Workspace Portal and one feature; the Application Publishing feature of VMware Horizon 6. I’m an End-User application kind of guy. That said, you should understand that I’m far from your ESXi and vSphere expert. If you want to keep up with the latest news in the VMware End-User Computing space make sure to follow me on Twitter, my handle is @thepeb. When I’m not a guest blogger, I frequently blog on the official ThinApp and Horizon Tech blogs.

In my role I produce a lot of blog posts and internal enablement material. I perform many tests using early code drops and on a daily basis I run my home lab to deliver live demos. I need a Home Lab that I can trust and that supports all my work tasks. I started building my lab many years ago. It all started with a single mid tower white box, but pretty soon I ran into resource constraints. I started to investigate what my next upgrade would look like.

I had a few requirements:

Keep the noise down
Shouldn’t occupy that much space
Should be affordable
Modular, I do not have money to buy everything upfront so it should be something I could build on top of.
Should be able to run VMware ESXi/vSphere
Should be cool

[Read more...]

New VMware Fling to improve Network/CPU performance when using Promiscuous Mode for Nested ESXi

08.28.2014 by William Lam // 44 Comments

I wrote an article awhile back Why is Promiscuous Mode & Forged Transmits required for Nested ESXi? and the primary motivation behind the article was in regards to an observation a customer made while using Nested ESXi. The customer was performing some networking benchmarks on their physical ESXi hosts which happened to be hosting a couple of Nested ESXi VMs as well as regular VMs. The customer concluded in his blog that running Nested ESXi VMs on their physical ESXi hosts actually reduced overall network throughput.

UPDATE (04/24/17) - Please have a look at the new ESXi Learnswitch which is an enhancement to the existing ESXi dvFilter MAC Learn module.

UPDATE (11/30/16) - A new version of the ESXi MAC Learning dvFilter has just been released to support ESXi 6.5, please download v2 for that ESXi release. If you have ESXi 5.x or 6.0, you will need to use the v1 version of the Fling as it is not backwards compat. You can all the details on the Fling page here.

This initially did not click until I started to think about this a bit more and the implications when enabling Promiscuous Mode which I think is something that not many of us are not aware of. At a very high level, Promiscuous Mode allows for proper networking connectivity for our Nested VMs running on top of a Nested ESXi VMs (For the full details, please refer to the blog article above). So why is this a problem and how does this lead to reduced network performance as well as increased CPU load?

The diagram below will hopefully help explain why. Here, I have a single physical ESXi host that is connected to either a VSS (Virtual Standard Switch) or VDS (vSphere Distributed Switch) and I have a portgroup which has Promiscuous Mode enabled and it contains both Nested ESXi VMs as well as regular VMs. Lets say we have 1000 Network Packets destined for our regular VM (highlighted in blue), one would expect that the red boxes (representing the packets) will be forwarded to our regular VM right?

What actually happens is shown in the next diagram below where every Nested ESXi VM as well as other regular VMs within the portgroup that has Promiscuous Mode enabled will receive a copy of those 1000 Network Packets on each of their vNICs even though they were not originally intended for them. This process of performing the shadow copies of the network packets and forwarding them down to the VMs is a very expensive operation. This is why the customer was seeing reduced network performance as well as increased CPU utilization to process all these additional packets that would eventually be discarded by the Nested ESXi VMs.

This really solidified in my head when I logged into my own home lab system which I run anywhere from 15-20 Nested ESXi VMs at any given time in addition to several dozen regular VMs just like any home/development/test lab would. I launched esxtop and set the refresh cycle to 2seconds and switched to the networking view. At the time I was transferring a couple of ESXi ISO’s for my kicskstart server and realized that ALL my Nested ESXi VMs got a copy of those packets.

As you can see from the screenshot above, every single one of my Nested ESXi VMs was receiving ALL traffic from the virtual switch, this definitely adds up to a lot of resources being wasted on my physical ESXi host which could be used for running other workloads.

I decided at this point to reach out to engineering to see if there was anything we could do to help reduce this impact. I initially thought about using NIOC but then realized it was primarily designed for managing outbound traffic where as the Promiscuous Mode traffic is all inbound and it would not actually get rid of the traffic. After speaking to a couple of Engineers, it turns out this issue had been seen in our R&D Cloud (Nimbus) which provides IaaS capabilities to the R&D Organization for quickly spinning up both Virtual/Physical instances for development and testing.

Christian Dickmann was my go to guy for Nimbus and it turns out this particular issue has been seen before. Not only has he seen this behavior, he also had a nice solution to fix the problem in the form of an ESXi dvFilter that implemented MAC Learning! As many of you know our VSS/VDS does not implement MAC Learning as we already know which MAC Addresses are assigned to a particular VM.

I got in touch with Christian and was able to validate his solution in my home lab using the latest ESXi 5.5 release. At this point, I knew I had to get this out to the larger VMware Community and started to work with Christian and our VMware Flings team to see how we can get this released as a Fling.

Today, I am excited to announce the ESXi Mac Learning dvFilter Fling which is distributed as an installable VIB for your physical ESXi host and it provides support for ESXi 5.x & ESXi 6.x

Note: You will need to enable Promiscuous Mode either on the VSS/VDS or specific portgroup/distributed portgroup for this solution to work.

You can download the MAC Learning dvFilter VIB here or you can install directly from the URL shown below:

To install the VIB, run the following ESXCLI command if you have VIB uploaded to your ESXi datastore:

esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/<DATASTORE>/vmware-esx-dvfilter-maclearn-0.1-ESX-5.0.vib -f

To install the VIB from the URL directly, run the following ESXCLI command:

esxcli software vib install -v http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/esxi-mac-learning-dvfilter/vmware-esx-dvfilter-maclearn-1.0.vib -f

A system reboot is not necessary and you can confirm the dvFilter was successfully installed by running the following command:

/sbin/summarize-dvfilter

You should be able see the new MAC Learning dvFilter listed at the very top of the output.

For the new dvFilter to work, you will need to add two Advanced Virtual Machine Settings to each of your Nested ESXi VMs and this is on a per vNIC basis, which means you will need to add N-entries if you have N-vNICs on your Nested ESXi VM.

ethernet#.filter4.name = dvfilter-maclearn
ethernet#.filter4.onFailure = failOpen

This can be done online without rebooting the Nested ESXi VMs if you leverage the vSphere API. Another way to add this is to shutdown your Nested ESXi VM and use either the “legacy” vSphere C# Client or vSphere Web Client or for those that know how to append and reload the .VMX file as that’s where the configuration file is persisted
on disk.

I normally provision my Nested ESXi VMs with 4 vNICs, so I have four corresponding entries. To confirm the settings are loaded, we can re-run the summarize-dvfilter command and we should now see our Virtual Machine listed in the output along with each vNIC instance.

Once I started to apply this changed across all my Nested ESXi VMs using a script I had written for setting Advanced VM Settings, I immediately saw the decrease of network traffic on ALL my Nested ESXi VMs. For those of you who wish to automate this configuration change, you can take a look at this blog article which includes both a PowerCLI & vSphere SDK for Perl script that can help.

I highly recommend anyone that uses Nested ESXi to ensure you have this VIB installed on all your ESXi hosts! As a best practice you should also ensure that you isolate your other workloads from your Nested ESXi VMs and this will allow you to limit which portgroups must be enabled with Promiscuous Mode.