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How to clean up stale vSphere Container Volumes & First Class Disks?

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If you are running and deploying Kubernetes (K8s) which includes vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), you might notice vSphere Container Volumes showing up in the vSphere UI under the Monitor tab for a given vSphere-based Datastore. This is normal and expected as new Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) are being requested as part of deploying K8s-based application that require storage.


Typically, when PVs and PVCs are no longer needed, they should be cleaned up within the K8s layer via kubectl either automatically or manually depending on your provisioning process. When you delete a K8s Cluster, these PVs/PVCs are not automatically cleaned up and its for good reason, you may want to reuse them and the way vSphere supports this is by implementing them as First Class Disks (FCD), which means they are lifecycle independent of a VM.

What happens when the K8s Cluster has been deleted and you actually want to clean up these stale FCDs, how do you go about doing that? This is a question I have seen come up more frequently and there are a few options.

Option 1:

If you happen to be on vSphere 7.0 Update 2 (which was just released yesterday), the vSphere UI has been enhanced to allow users to now delete vSphere Container Volume (see screenshot above). Previously, you could only view the FCDs and reapply a storage policy.

Option 2:

Since vSphere Container Volumes are just FCDs and we have FCD APIs, we can use the API to retrieve information as well as clean them up. The easiest way is to use PowerCLI's Get-CnsVolume and Remove-CnsVolume cmdlets.

Here is an example of deleting the 2GB volume:

Get-CnsVolume -Datastore (Get-Datastore "sm-vsanDatastore") -Name "pvc-db6829ad-e1a9-46e8-ace3-7e7c18187a0d" | Remove-CnsVolume

In the case of standalone FCDs, which could have been manually provisioned or through a backup solution, you can also clean them up by using PowerCLI's Get-VDisk and Remove-VDisk cmdlets respectively:

Get-VDisk -Name "fill-me-in" | Remove-VDisk

vSAN Witness using Raspberry Pi 4 & ESXi-Arm Fling

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As hinted in my earlier blog post, you can indeed setup a vSAN Witness using the ESXi-Arm Fling running on a Raspberry Pi (rPI) 4b (8GB) model. In fact, you can even setup a standard 2-Node or 3-Node vSAN Cluster using the exact same technique. For those familiar with vSAN and the vSAN Witness, we will need to have at least two storage devices for the caching and capacity tier.

For the rPI, this means we are limited to using USB storage devices and luckily, vSAN can actually claim and consume USB storage devices. For a basic homelab, this is probably okay but if you want something a bit more reliable, you can look into using a USB 3.0 to M.2 NVMe chassis. The ability to use an M.2 NVMe device should definitely provide more resiliency compared to a typical USB stick you might have lying around. From a capacity point of view, I had two 32GB USB keys that I ended up using which should be plenty for a small setup but you can always look at purchasing large capacity given how cheap USB devices are.

Disclaimer: ESXi-Arm is a VMware Fling which means it is not a product and therefore it is not officially supported. Please do not use it in Production.

With the disclaimer out of the way, I think this is a fantastic use case for an inexpensive vSAN Witness which could be running at a ROBO/Edge location or simply supporting your homelab. The possibilities are certainly endless and I think this is where the ESXi-Arm team would love to hear whether this is something customers would even be interested in and please share your feedback to help with priorities for both the ESXi-Arm and vSAN team.

In my setup, I have two Intel NUC 9th Pro which make up my 2-Node vSAN Cluster and then an rPI as my vSAN Witness. Detailed instructions can be found below including a video for those wanting to see vSAN Witness in action by actually powering on an actual workload 😀

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ESXi on Arm Fling is LIVE!

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The highly anticipated ESXi on Arm Fling has just been announced and is NOW generally available as a new VMware Fling! Head over to https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition and be sure to carefully read through the Requirements and documentation before try out the bits.

History

Although ESXi-Arm was publicly demo'ed at VMworld Europe 2018 during the closing keynote by Ray O'Farrell (former CTO of VMware), the reality was there was a ton more to do before ESXi-Arm could be a reality for VMware customers. The newly formed ESXi-Arm team at VMware has been hard at work these last couple of years working with both Arm and its eco-system in extending hardware standards, firmware standards (open contribution to UEFI), and certification beyond the existing Arm server ecosystem, which enabled us to support platforms like SmartNICs and the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. This is just a glimpse into what it took to get where we are at today.

I am also excited to share that the Virtually Speaking Podcast crew has invited us back for an exclusive episode featuring both Andrei Warkentin and myself to dive deeper into the development of ESXi-Arm project at VMware. This is an episode you will not want to miss!

Hardware

The ESXi-Arm Fling supports a number of different Arm platforms ranging from a traditional Datacenter form-factor to both Near and Far Edge systems including the highly requested Raspberry Pi (rPI)! With the rPI, only the 4b model will be supported and although both the 4GB and 8GB memory model works with ESXi-Arm. We highly recommend folks invest in the 8GB model to be able to take advantage of more vSphere features and be able to run more workloads.


For a complete list of supported Arm hardware platforms, please refer to the Requirements section of the Fling website. If there are other platforms you would like to see get added, do not hesitate to either leave a comment here and/or post directly on the ESXi-Arm Fling page.

vCenter Support

For customers with an existing x86 vCenter Server or those that would like to deploy a new vCenter Server, you will be able to attach and manage ESXi-Arm hosts just like you normally would as long as you are using vCenter Server 7.0 or greater.


We expect the majority of vSphere platform features to "just work" like vMotion but there may be some features that may not work or have additional requirements.


For example, to enable vSphere HA and/or vSphere FT, the Fault Domain Manager (FDM) Client VIB must be installed on an ESXi-Arm host. Today, this VIB is distributed as part of vCenter Server and only x86 version of the client is available. We do provide FDM Client VIBs for ESXi-Arm as part of the ESXi-Arm Fling, but support will be limited to vCenter Server 7.0c and 7.0d. For detailed instructions, please refer to the ESXi-Arm documentation.

VMware Tools

VMware Tools for ESXi-Arm GuestOS is not bundled as part of ESXi-Arm Fling, but can be installed. To do so, you will need to compile open-vm-tools for your respective GuestOS. Instructions can be found in the ESXi-Arm Fling documentation and below, you can see a screenshot of VMware Tools for Arm successfully running on Ubuntu 20.04 GuestOS running on ESXi-Arm on the rPI 4.

vSAN Witness

Lastly, a popular use case that has been brought up when ESXi-Arm was initially demo'ed was the use of the rPI as an inexpensive vSAN Witness, which is a fantastic use case for ROBO & Edge locations. I am very happy to share that using an rPI 8GB as a vSAN Witness works! As you can see from the screenshot below, I have two physical Intel NUC 9th Pro configured in a 2-Node vSAN Cluster and I am using the rPI as vSAN Witness 😀


In case this was not clear, this is NOT officially supported but it does demonstrate the viability of this concept and and feedback from the our users would help drive the priority and the potential support for such a configuration. More details will be shared in a future blog post outlining the instructions on using rPI as vSAN Witness. Stay tuned!

As you can see, this is just a small taste of what can be done with the ESXi-Arm Fling and the possibilities are truly endless! The ESXi-Arm team is very excited to see what the community will do with the ESXi-Arm Fling, what type of use cases are you solving or workloads that you are running. Below are a few ways in how you can engage with the ESXi-Arm team and community.

ESXi-Arm Engagement

  • For general questions/issues, please leave a Comment and/or file Bug on the ESXi-Arm Fling site
  • Follow ESXi-Arm on Twitter: @esxi_arm
  • Follow the official ESXi-Arm Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/arm
  • Chat with the ESXi-Arm team and community on Slack: #esxi-arm-fling on VMware {code}
  • For other inquiries or engaging with ESXi on ARM Product Team, you can send an email to esxionarm [at] vmware [dot] com