Search Results for: nested esxi

ESXi 6.5 Virtual Appliance is now available

11.18.2016 by William Lam // 32 Comments

The much anticipated release of vSphere 6.5 has officially GA'ed and you can find all the release notes and downloads over here. Just like prior releases, I have created a new Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance to aide in quickly setting up a vSphere 6.5 environment for both educational as well as lab purposes. If you have not used this Virtual Appliance before, I strongly recommend you thoroughly review this blog post here for the background before proceeding further.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware, please use this at your own risk (the usual).

The new ESXi 6.5 Virtual Appliance includes the following configuration:

ESXi 6.5 OS [New]
GuestType: ESXi 6.5[New]
vHW 11 [New]
2 vCPU
6GB vMEM
2 x VMXNET vNIC
1 x PVSCSI Adapter [New]
1 x 2GB HDD (ESXi Installation)
1 x 4GB SSD (for use w/VSAN, empty by default)
1 x 8GB SSD (for use w/VSAN, empty by default)
VHV added (more info here)
dvFilter Mac Learn VMX params added (more info here)
disk.enableUUID VMX param added
VSAN traffic tagged on vmk0
Disabled VSAN device monitoring for home labs (more info here)
VMFS6 will be used if user selects to create VMFS volume [New]
Enabled sparse swap (more info here) [New]

To be able to import and use this new ESXi VA, you will need to be running at least vSphere 6.0 Update 2 in your environment as I take advantage of some of the new Nested ESXi enhancements in vSphere 6.5. If you need to run ESXi 6.5 on earlier versions of vSphere, then you can take my existing 5.5 or 6.0 VAs and manually upgrade to 6.5.

Now that you made it this far, here is download: Nested_ESXi6.5d_Appliance_Template_v1.ova

Lastly, I have also spent some time building some new automation scripts which takes advantage of my Nested ESXi VAs and deploys a fully functional vSphere lab environment without even breaking a sweat. Below is a little sneak peak at what you can expect 😀 Watch the blog for more details!

How to enable vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) in vSphere 6.5 w/single ESXi host?

11.16.2016 by William Lam // 5 Comments

One of the big new features that was introduced in vSphere 6.5, exclusively for vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), is the vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) capablilty. Feidhlim O'Leary has an excllent blog post covering what VCHA provides as well as a couple of demo videos on how it works, definitely worth checking out! After upgrading one of my home lab enviornments to vSphere 6.5, I wanted to try out this feature from an educational standpoint and specifically around using new VCHA vSphere APIs.

Like most vSphere Home Labbers, I have limited hardware and if you try to enable VCHA with only a single ESXi host, you will see the following error:

This operation would violate a virtual machine affinity/anti-affinity rule.

As you might expect, VCHA will automatically provision affinity rules to ensure that the active, passive and witness node are not all running on the same physical ESXi host. For a production deployment this is completely valid but for lab and testing purposes, this might be a tough requirement to satisfy. I was hoping there might be an override option and searching for the word "ha" in the vCenter Server Advanced Settings lead me to an interesting property called config.vpxd.vcha.drsAntiAffinity. This discovery was purely by luck and I had noticed it was set to true by default, so I decided to change it to false and see what would happen.

To my surprise, changing this setting worked and I was able to successfully enable VCHA in my lab with all three nodes just running on a single ESXi host 😀

An alternative solution would be to deploy a 3-Node Nested ESXi cluster which would not require this modification, but my physical ESXi host was limited on memory, only 16GB and would have been a lot slower.

How to tell if an ESXi host is a VSAN Witness Virtual Appliance programmatically?

09.26.2016 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I had received this question awhile back but I was only able to get to it recently. If you are not familiar with the VSAN Witness Virtual Appliance and its purpose, Cormac Hogan did an excellent write-up on the topic which you can find it here.

The reason this question came up was that if you were to simply iterate over all ESXi hosts within your vSphere Inventory from an Automation standpoint, you might find a mix of regular ESXi hosts and potentially this new VSAN Witness Virtual Appliance which is basically an ESXi host that runs in a VM (e.g. Nested ESXi). Although, it may look and feel like a regular ESXi host, it is not and the question was how might you go about distinguishing between the two? You can of course setup specific naming standards, folder structure or separate datacenter objects, but you still may accidentally retrieve a VSAN Witness host without even realizing it.

One quick solution is to check for a specific ESXi Advanced Setting called Misc.vsanWitnessVirtualAppliance which will return a value of 1 if it is the VSAN Witness Appliance. Here is a quick PowerCLI snippet which demonstrates how you can access this property:

$vmhost = Get-VMHost -Name 192.168.1.115
Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vmhost -Name Misc.vsanWitnessVirtualAppliance

Although the method described above is one quick way to easily identify whether an ESXi host is a VSAN Witness Appliance, it is also limited in the information that it provides you. Another approach is to actually use the new VSAN 6.2 Management API and specifically the Stretched Clustering System APIs to retrieve the associated VSAN Witness host for a given VSAN Cluster. Not only will you get more information about the specific ESXi host providing the VSAN Witness functionality which will allow you to correlate back to your vSphere Inventory, but you will also get additional VSAN Witness configuration such as the preferred Fault Domain, Node UUID and the VSAN Cluster that it is associated with for example.

Here is a quick VSAN Management SDK for Python sample script that I had created called vsan-stretched-cluster-system-sample.py which implements the VSANVcGetWitnessHosts() API method. The script prints out a few of the WitnessHostInfo properties as shown in the screenshot below.

One other option is if you simply just want to know if a given ESXI host is a VSAN Witness host or not, there is also the VSANVcIsWitnessHost() API that simply returns a boolean value. This might useful if you just have a list of ESXi hosts retrieved through the vSphere API and no knowledge of the underlying VSAN Clusters.