WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: nested esxi

w00t! VMware Tools for Nested ESXi!

by // 42 Comments

I have been working with Nested ESXi since it original inception and this technology has greatly benefited me and the entire VMware community, especially when it comes to learning about VMware software and being able to easily prototype something before installing it on actual hardware. However, one thing that I felt that has been missing for awhile now is the ability to run an instance of VMware Tools within a Nested ESXi VM. I have personally been asking for this feature for a couple of years and I know many in the VMware community have expressed interests as well.

I am super excited to announce that VMware has just released a new Fling that provides you with a VIB that you can install VMware Tools inside a Nested ESXi host. I originally showed a demo of this at VMworld Barcelona in my vBrownBag Tech Talk and as I mentioned we would be releasing this as a VMware Fling very soon. So here it is!

UPDATE (08/20/15) - An updated version of VMware Tools for Nested ESXi was just published, make sure to download latest version and you can find more details here.

Requirements:

  • Nested ESXi running 5.0, 5.1 or 5.5 

Installation:

To install the VIB, you simply just need to download it and upload the VIB it to your Nested ESXi datastore and then run the following commands:

esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e true
esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/[VMFS-VOLUME-NAME]/esx-tools-for-esxi-9.7.0-0.0.00000.i386.vib -f
esxcli system shutdown reboot -r "Installed VMware Tools"

You can also install the VIB directly from VMware.com if you have direct or proxy internet connectivity from your ESXi host by running the following commands:

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient
esxcli software vib install -v http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/esxi_tools_for_guests/esx-tools-for-esxi-9.7.0-0.0.00000.i386.vib -f

Once the VIB has been successfully installed, you will need to reboot the host for the changes to take effect. To verify, you can now login to either your vSphere Web/C# Client and you should now see the status for VMware Tools for your Nested ESXi host showing green and the IP Address of the Nested ESXi host should be displayed.

So why would you want to do this? Well, there’s a couple of reasons actually. The first one is pretty basic, which is when I need to reboot or shutdown a Nested ESXi VM, instead of having to jump into the VM console or SSH into ESXi host, I could just right click in the vSphere Web/C# Client and just say shutdown or reboot. I also tend to do all sorts of craziness in my lab (I’m sure this is an understatement for folks that know me) and may often break networking connectivity to my Nested ESXi VM. In vSphere 5.0, we introduced the Guest Operations API (formally known as VIX API) which is now part of the vSphere API. This API is actually quite handy as it allows you to perform guest operations within the VM without needing network connectivity as it relies on the fact that VMware Tools is running (pretty cool stuff!).

Here is a screenshot demonstrating the executing of vmkfstools through the Guest Operations API to one of my Nested ESXi VM:

A couple of things to note:

  • If you install VMware Tools on Nested ESXi VM, you will NOT be able to just right click in the UI and say install/upgrade
  • If you wish to integrate this into you ESXi image, you can take a look at a community tool  called ESXi-Customizer created by Andreas Peetz which I have used in the past and works great. Image Builder does not support raw VIBs, only zip files which may need to contain additional metadata information. If you want to create an offline bundle instead to then use Image Builder to create your custom ISO, Andreas has a new tool you can take a look at here.

Finally, if you have any feedback (likes/dis-likes), thanks, comments please head over to the VMware's Fling page for VMware Tools for Nested ESXi and leave a comment. I am sure the Jim Mattson the engineer who built this Fling would greatly appreciate any feedback you may have.

How to run Nested ESXi on top of a VSAN datastore?

by // 36 Comments

Today I found an interesting article on my Twitter timeline regarding some issues when trying to install and run Nested ESXi on top of a VSAN datastore. Shortly after the ESXi installation begins, the following error message is observed:

This program has encountered an error:

Error (see log for more info):
Could not format a vmfs volume.
Command ‘/usr/sbin/vmkfstools -C vmfs5 -b 1m -S datastore1
/vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba1:C0:T0:L0:3′ exited with status 1048320

This of course piqued my interest given the topic and I would have expected this to just work and thought this might have been some miss-configuration. I decided to try this out in my lab and to my surprise, I encountered the exact same problem.

Here is a quick screenshot of error message:

I pinged a couple of folks from the VSAN development team to see if this was a known issue and if so, why was it occurring? After a couple of email exchanges, it turns the problem is with a SCSI-2 reservation being generated as part of creating a default VMFS datastore. Even though VMFS-5 no longer uses SCSI-2 reservations, the underlying LVM (Logical Volume Manager) driver for VMFS still requires it. Since VSAN does not make use of SCSI-2 reservations, it did not make sense to support it and hence the issue. Having said that, since Nested Virtualization is heavily used at VMware, the VSAN development team has come up with a nifty solution as they too hit this problem early on during the development of VSAN. Big thanks to Christian Dickmann (Tech Lead on the VSAN Engineering team) for providing this little tidbit.

Disclaimer: Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware nor are the configuration changes described below, please use at your own risk.

To get around this problem, the VSAN team added in an advanced ESXi setting that would "fake" SCSI Reservations and this needs to be configured for the physical ESXi hosts providing up the physical VSAN datastore.

Run the following ESXCLI command (either locally on ESXi Shell or remotely)

esxcli system settings advanced set -o /VSAN/FakeSCSIReservations -i 1

A system reboot is not required and this change can be done live on the ESXi host prior to starting the ESXi installation. Once this is done, you will now be able to proceed with installing Nested ESXi on top of a VSAN datastore. Here is a screenshot of my Nested ESXi VM running on top of Nested ESXi VSAN datastore 🙂

Hopefully this workaround will be useful for anyone running VSAN and would like to fully make use of this storage by running Nested ESXi for development or testing.

How to quickly setup and test VMware VSAN (Virtual SAN) using Nested ESXi

by // 48 Comments

Last week at VMworld 2013, VMware announced the release of vSphere 5.5 which includes a variety of exciting new features.  One of the most anticipated feature introduced in this release is VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) which will be available initially as a public beta. One question that I heard repeatedly throughout the VMworld conference was whether it would be possible to test VSAN in a nested ESXi environment? The answer is absolutely! This is a great way to learn about VSAN and how works from a functional perspective before procuring the necessary hardware.

Disclaimer: Running VSAN in a nested ESXi environment is not officially supported nor is it a replacement for actual testing on actual physical hardware.

Before getting started, I would highly recommend you check out the following resources from my good friend Cormac Hogan which includes a detailed VSAN walk through as well what looks to be an awesome series of articles on how VSAN works:

Requirements:

  • Environment running either vSphere 5.1 or 5.5 and access to the vSphere Web Client.

Configuration:

Nested ESXi VM configured with the minimal resources:

  • 2 vCPU
  • 5GB Memory (ESXi 5.5 now requires a minimum of 4GB vs 2GB as with previous releases but VSAN requires minimum of 5 with recommended 6)
  • 2GB Disk for ESXi 5.5 installation
  • 4GB Disk for an "Emulated" SSD
  • 8GB Disk for HDD

Easy Method:

Instead of having you go through the process of building a Nested ESXi VM with all the prerequisites that includes steps from here and here. I have pre-built a VSAN Nested ESXi VM template (217Kb) that you can just download and import into your environment and being the installation process.

Download either:

and connect to your vCenter Server 5.1 or 5.5 using the vSphere Web Client and import the OVF into your environment (do not use the vSphere C# Client as the import does not persist VHV configuration). Once you have imported the VM, you can then mount the ESXi 5.5 ISO and begin the installation. All three VMDKs have been thin provisioned and you can change the capacity during deployment.

Slightly Harder Method:

If you wish to build the Nested ESXi VM yourself, then you can follow these instructions:

Step 1 - Create a new VM and when you get to the compatibility screen, select either "ESXi 5.1 or greater" or "ESXi 5.5 or greater" depending on the version of vSphere you are running

Step 2 - For the GuestOS select "Other" and "Other (64-bit)"

Step 3 - We will need to customize the following virtual hardware configuration:

  • Change vCPU to 2
  • Click on CPU drop down and enable "Expose hardware assisted virtualization to the guest OS"
  • Change Memory to 4GB
  • Change the initial VMDK to 2GB or whatever value you wish to use for ESXi installation
  • Add second VMDK with 4GB or whatever value you wish to use for "emulated" SSD
  • Add third VMDK with 8GB of whatever value you wish to use for the HDD
  • Click on the VM Options tab at the top and select the "Advanced" drop down box. We will need to add the following entry scsi0:1.virtualSSD = 1 For more details please refer to this article

Step 4 - Click okay to provision the VM and once it has been deployed you will need to re-configure the guestOS to "VMware ESXi 5.x" using the vSphere C# Client for vSphere 5.1 or vSphere Web Client for vSphere 5.5. At this point, you will have the same VM image as in the Easy Method and you are now ready to install ESXi 5.5

When you install ESXi 5.5, you should see the following three disks as shown in the screenshot below, ensure you install ESXi on the 2GB disk:

Prior to enabling VSAN on the particular vSphere Cluster, make sure you enable the new VSAN traffic type on one of your VMkernel interfaces for each of your ESXi hosts, this is required for VSAN communication.

If all the prerequisites have been met, you can now easily enable VSAN by simply checking the VSAN box when editing the vSphere Cluster. In just a few minutes you should see diskgroups automatically created (assuming you selected Automatic mode) consuming both the emulated SSD and HDD and the creation of the vsanDatastore which will be available on all ESXi hosts within that vSphere Cluster.

You can also use the same method for emulating an SSD running in a Nested ESXi to functional test the new VMware Flash Read Cache (vFRC) feature.