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How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vCloud Director 5.1

08.29.2012 by William Lam // 5 Comments

The process to enable "Nested Virtualization" in the latest release of vCloud Director 5.1 and create your own virtual lab similar to VMware's vSEL (Virtual Sales Enablement Cloud) is very similar to the previous steps outlined for vCloud Director 1.5 release. The only change is how VHV (Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization) aka "Nested Virtualization" is enabled in vCloud Director 5.1 and ESXi 5.1.

In the vCloud Director 1.5, to enable VHV, you needed to add a special SQL statement that would enable VHV for the underlying ESXi 5.0 hosts. With the latest release of vCloud Director 5.1, that is no longer necessary and you now enable it on a Per VM basis within the vCloud Director 5.1 UI.

Here are the steps for enabling VHV for vCloud Director 5.1

Insert SQL statements into VCD Database that perform the following:
- Enable new "VMware" guestOS Family
- Enable new guestOS Type ESXi 4.x and 5.x
- Enable host preparation to enable VHV (vSphere 5.0 & vCloud 1.5 only)
Enable promiscuous mode
- Insert SQL statement into VCD Database for Network Pool that is being used for your ESXi VMs
- Enable both Promiscuous Mode and Forged Transmit for vSphere Backed Portgroup within vCenter Server or ESXi host

The SQL statements can be found in this article and have not changed for vCloud Director 5.1

Here is a screenshot of what you should see in the vCloud Director 5.1 UI for creating a new VM and you should now have the ability to select a new guestOS Type called "VMware" and select either an ESXi 4.x or ESXi 5.x guestOS Version.

To enable VHV for the VM, you will need to also check the box "Exposed hardware-assisted CPU virtualization to guestOS" and this will allow you to run a nested ESXi VM as well as 64-bit nested VMs, assuming your physical CPUs support it. To learn more about running VHV on ESXi 5.1, take a look at this article here for more details.

There's a CloudPhysics Card for that

08.22.2012 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

“There’s a CloudPhysics card for that” … is what you could be saying pretty soon with all the great ideas that have been suggested so far in the CloudPhysics Lab for the CloudPhysics VMworld 2012 Challenge. One of the coolest aspect of the challenge, is it is 100% community driven and the idea is really simple. Suggest an idea (using a card) that describes an issue or challenge you have faced or are facing in your vSphere environment.

Note: To learn more about CloudPhysics, check out Frank Denneman’s CloudPhysics in a nutshell article.

An example card suggestion could be automatically validate all Virtual Machines against the vSphere Security Hardening Guide or provide a DRS vCPU analyzer and recommend or automate Virtual Machine migration based on vCPU count.
As you can see, the possibilities are endless and there are currently over 500 cards that have been suggested so far. You still have time to join in on the fun (contest ends on Aug 26th, 2012), just sign up at at CloudPhysics.com and start suggesting your ideas and you can win some really cool prizes if your card is rated as one of the best by the community.

Note: Due to U.S legislation, non-U.S. residents are excluded from winning prizes

The voting system on CloudPhysics just went live yesterday and there is also a new layout for viewing all the cards in the system. The cards are now organized in the following manner:

My Suggested Cards (these are cards you created)
Most Popular
Newest Cards
Random Cards
All Community Cards

So after you are done submitting your card ideas, be sure to vote on some of your favorite community cards or leave comments on the cards. The more voting and commenting you do, the more points you earn!

Here are a few cards that I personally thought were interesting and voted for:

So hopefully in the near future, you can say “There is a CloudPhysics Card for that” and it just might be your card!

Configuring ESXi Power Management Policy Using the CLI

08.18.2012 by William Lam // 12 Comments

An interesting question on the VMTN forum caught my eye today, which was around configuring ESXi's Power Management Policy using the command-line via a kickstart script. I found this question to be interesting as I never had to tweak this configuration and was curious myself to see how you might be able to perform this via the command-line as I never recall seeing a command relating to the power management settings.

After a few minutes of digging, I found that the standard set of CLI's such as ESXCLI, vim-cmd, etc. do not provide a way to configure ESXi's power management settings but did find it was possible using my other favorite "not officially supported" CLI called vsish. Now, you can of course create a remote script using the vSphere API to configure this setting, but if you are looking to modify this within a kickstart script, this is route you will want to take.

UPDATE (01/12/15) - I just found out today from Engineering that it is possible to configure ESXi power management policy using ESXCLI. Though the parameters are currently set to hidden, you can use the following command to set the appropriate policy based on your enviornment.

esxcli system settings advanced set --option=/Power/CpuPolicy --string-value="High Performance"

UPDATE (11/04/14) - It turns out configuration changes made directly through vsish do not persist after a reboot, this might be problematic for most of you 😉 Luckily, Alan Castonguay who works in our GSS organization reached out and created a nice pyvmomi (vSphere SDK or Python) script that can be executed in the ESXi shell and of course it can easily be integrated into a Kickstart script. I have tested his sample script to verify its functionality and have also checked it into my Github repository so that others can benefit from. You can download the script which I have named configure_esxi_power_policy.py

If you run the script without any arguments, it will display the current power policy that has been enabled as seen in the screenshot below:

To change the policy, you will need to specify the "shortName" power policy, in this example I want to change it from "static" to "low":

To check whether your ESXi host supports power management, run the following command:

~ # vsish -e get /power/hardwareSupport
Hardware power management support {
CPU power management:Enhanced Intel SpeedStep(R)
Memory power management:Not available
}

To view the current power management setting, run the following command:

~ # vsish -e get /power/currentPolicy
Host power management policy {
ID: 2
Short name:dynamic
Long name:Balanced
Description:Reduce energy consumption with minimal performance compromise
}

Just like the vSphere Client, you have 4 options which maps to the "ID" property as seen above. You can get more details by querying each of the policy (1-4), here is an example:

~ # vsish -e get /power/policy/1
Host power management policy {
ID: 1
Short name:static
Long name:High Performance
Description:Do not use any power management features
}

Here's a quick table that maps the policy ID to power management policy which is the same order as shown in the vSphere Client:

Policy ID	Power Management Policy
1	High Performance
2	Balanced
3	Lower Power
4	Custom

To change the power management policy, run the following command:

~ # vsish -e set /power/currentPolicy 1

So now you can integrate power management settings in your ESXi kickstart script for automated deployment and configurations!