vSphere – Page 97

Exploring VSAN APIs Part 5 – VSAN Host Status

03.17.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Another useful bit of information from a troubleshooting perspective is to be able to quickly get summary of all your ESXi hosts participating in a VSAN cluster. Critical information such as the health, state, VSAN Node/Cluster UUID for each ESXi host can be queried through the vsanSystem using the QueryHostStatus() vSphere API method. To demonstrate this simple operation, I have created a vSphere SDK for Perl sample script called vsanHostDiskMapping.pl.

Disclaimer: These scripts are provided for informational and educational purposes only. It should be thoroughly tested before attempting to use in a production environment.

To show the ESXi host status, you will need to specify a vSphere Cluster running VSAN and use the following command:

./vsanHostStatus.pl --server vcenter55-1.primp-industries.com --username root --cluster VSAN-Cluster

As you can see this is an easy way to quickly get the health of ESXi host participating in the VSAN cluster.

Useful Links - Installing Mac OS X in a VM & P2V'ing Mac OS X

03.10.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

A couple of weeks back I received an interesting email regarding a couple of topics related to Apple Mac OS X and vSphere. The first one was related to the steps required for installing Mac OS X in a Virtual Machine. Though the process for installing Mac OS X in a Virtual Machine is pretty straight forward, there is an additional step that you must preform before you can get started. This was actually something I ran into when I first tried to install Mac OS X in a Virtual Machine. I found this handy online resource by VMware called Guest Operating System Installation Guide that provides the exact steps required and you will find a link for each of the supported Mac OS X systems as shown in the list below.

Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks)
Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)
Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)
Mac OS X Server 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
Mac OS X Server 10.5 (Leopard)

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Exploring VSAN APIs Part 4 – VSAN Disk Mappings

03.10.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

A useful feature that is provided in the vSphere Web Client for VSAN is the ability to visualize the VSAN disk mappings for each ESXi host contributing to the VSAN cluster. This information will come in handy for troubleshooting as well as checking or servicing a disk failure.

You can easily retrieve the VSAN Disk Groups for each ESXi host and their respective SSD and HDD within that disk group by looking at the following property vsanSystem->config->storageInfo->diskMapping. There is a variety of information for each device such as the name, capacity, state, health, etc. of each disk. To demonstrate the above operation, I have created a vSphere SDK for Perl sample script called vsanHostTrafficTypeMgmt.pl

Disclaimer: These scripts are provided for informational and educational purposes only. It should be thoroughly tested before attempting to use in a production environment.

To show the disk mappings, you will need to specify a vSphere Cluster running VSAN using the following command:

./vsanHostDiskMapping.pl --server vcenter55-1.primp-industries.co --username root --cluster VSAN-Cluster

In the above output, you will see the VSAN Disk Groups for each ESXi host along with their respective device name and capacity. Here is another screenshot for a VSAN environment that contains multiple VSAN Disk Groups:

This is just a very tiny sub-set of the available properties for a disk, for more information take a look at the scsiLun definition within the vSphere API Reference.