Search Results for: nested esxi

Why is my VSAN Component maximum showing less than 3000?

01.28.2015 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

This is a question that I have seen come up on several occasions in both the VMTN Community forums as well as in our internal Socialcast group. I have not seen anyone blog about this topic yet and figure I would share the answer since this was a question I had asked myself when I had initially setup VSAN. If you are not familiar with VSAN Components, I highly recommend you check out Cormac Hogan's blog article VSAN Part 4: Understanding Objects and Components.

In vSphere 5.5 Update 1, the maximum number of supported components for VSAN is 3000 which is a per ESXi host maximum. What some folks are noticing when they run the RVC vsan.check_limits command on their VSAN Cluster, they are finding out that the maximum is coming up much lower as seen in the example below.

/localhost/VSAN-Datacenter/computers> vsan.check_limits VSAN-Cluster/
2015-01-28 15:34:25 +0000: Gathering stats from all hosts ...
2015-01-28 15:34:27 +0000: Gathering disks info ...
+--------------------------------+-------------------+-------------------------------------------+
| Host                           | RDT               | Disks                                     |
+--------------------------------+-------------------+-------------------------------------------+
| vesxi55-3.primp-industries.com | Assocs: 30/20000  | Components: 8/750                         |
|                                | Sockets: 17/10000 | naa.6000c2932c3f51f04e4cd395f4a11752: 8%  |
|                                | Clients: 3        | naa.6000c294f6496a99ad756857b9b06f01: 0%  |
|                                | Owners: 5         |                                           |
| vesxi55-2.primp-industries.com | Assocs: 10/20000  | Components: 8/750                         |
|                                | Sockets: 13/10000 | naa.6000c294bde5987d60398e0305978b00: 9%  |
|                                | Clients: 0        | naa.6000c292a964255b82410099360a9b27: 0%  |
|                                | Owners: 0         |                                           |
| vesxi55-1.primp-industries.com | Assocs: 24/20000  | Components: 8/750                         |
|                                | Sockets: 15/10000 | naa.6000c298b69006b820e367b5fde97cbf: 11% |
|                                | Clients: 3        | naa.6000c29db3f272cfb7fb4d08bffad3ab: 0%  |
|                                | Owners: 3         |                                           |
+--------------------------------+-------------------+-------------------------------------------+

The reason for this is actually due to the amount of physical memory available to each ESXi host. If you are running VSAN in a Nested ESXi environment like I am in the example above, I only have 8GB of memory configured for each ESXi host. The number of supported VSAN Components will definitely differ from an actual physical host with more memory and the nice thing about vsan.check_limits command is that it is dynamic in nature based on the actual available resources. Funny enough, the majority of the questions actually came from folks who ran VSAN in a Nested Environment, so this would explain why this question keeps popping up.

If I run the same RVC command on an environment where VSAN was running on real hardware with a decent amount of memory which most modern systems these days have, then I can see the VSAN Component maximum is properly displaying the 3000 limit as expected in the example below.

/localhost/datacenter01/computers> vsan.check_limits vsan-cluster01/
2015-01-28 15:28:47 +0000: Querying limit stats from all hosts ...
2015-01-28 15:28:49 +0000: Fetching VSAN disk info from esx021.vmwcs.com (may take a moment) ...
2015-01-28 15:28:49 +0000: Fetching VSAN disk info from esx022.vmwcs.com (may take a moment) ...
2015-01-28 15:28:49 +0000: Fetching VSAN disk info from esx024.vmwcs.com (may take a moment) ...
2015-01-28 15:28:51 +0000: Done fetching VSAN disk infos
+---------------------------+--------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Host                      | RDT                | Disks                                                                           |
+---------------------------+--------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| esx021.vmwcs.com          | Assocs: 223/45000  | Components: 97/3000                                                             |
|                           | Sockets: 132/10000 | t10.ATA_____WDC_WD1002FAEX2D00Z3A0________________________WD2DWCATRC061926: 18% |
|                           | Clients: 14        | t10.ATA_____KINGSTON_SH103S3480G__________________00_50026B7226017C69____: 0%   |
|                           | Owners: 29         |                                                                                 |
| esx022.vmwcs.com          | Assocs: 252/45000  | Components: 96/3000                                                             |
|                           | Sockets: 143/10000 | t10.ATA_____KINGSTON_SH103S3480G__________________00_50026B7226017CA2____: 0%   |
|                           | Clients: 14        | t10.ATA_____WDC_WD1002FAEX2D00Z3A0________________________WD2DWCATRC050466: 19% |
|                           | Owners: 38         |                                                                                 |
| esx024.vmwcs.com          | Assocs: 197/45000  | Components: 96/3000                                                             |
|                           | Sockets: 122/10000 | t10.ATA_____ST2000DL0032D9VT166__________________________________5YD73PRP: 8%   |
|                           | Clients: 17        | t10.ATA_____KINGSTON_SH103S3480G__________________00_50026B7226017C5B____: 0%   |
|                           | Owners: 22         |                                                                                 |
+---------------------------+--------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The lesson here is that even though I am a huge supporter of using Nested ESXi to learn about new products, features and how they work from a functional perspective, there is no amount of Nested ESXi testing that can ever replace actual testing of real hardware.

Fun end of the year facts on virtuallyGhetto

12.22.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I woke up at 6am this past Sunday for no apparent reason. Perhaps my body is preparing me for parenthood? In any case, I could not go back to sleep and started to think about some of the blogs I have written this past year on virtuallyGhetto (finishing its 5th year). With the year almost ending, I thought it would be cool to check out some of the statistics on virtuallyGhetto for this past year and share some of the fun facts with my readers. The data below is gathered by a WordPress plugin called Jetpack which is a must have for any bloggers using WordPress and the WP Statistics Plugin.

I would also like to take this moment and say thank you to all my sponsors for supporting virtuallyGhetto and most importantly I would like to say thank you to my readers. Thank you for your engagement whether that is a comment on my blog, a discussion on Twitter, an email describing a problem or just saying hi at a conference. Thank you to everyone who has shared interesting stories, challenges and unique use cases on how you use VMware products and continuing to help us improve our products. 2014 has been an amazing year and I look forward to all the exciting things coming in 2015 as well as continuing to share and contribute back to the community through my blog. If there are any topics that you would like to see me explore further or continue to explore next year, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I wish you a Happy Holidays tand have a fun and safe Happy New Years, see you all in 2015!

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Automating the silent installation of Site Recovery Manager 5.8 w/Embedded vPostgres DB

10.28.2014 by William Lam // 6 Comments

Last week I had a nice email exchange with Ben Meadowcroft who is the Product Manager for VMware's Site Recovery Manager. While chatting with Ben, I learned about new feature that I was not aware of in the latest SRM 5.8 release which now supports an embedded vPostgres database. Not only does this greatly simplify the installation and not requiring an external database like Microsoft SQL or Oracle, it is also on par in terms scalability with the external databases which is great for customers. I definitely like this improvement in the SRM installation and making it easier to evaluate and POC without requiring a large resource footprint.

UPDATE (11/09/15) - For silent installation of SRM 6.x, please take a look at this article here as some of the install params have changed.

In addition to new database feature, I also learned that SRM supports a silent mode installation which I was not aware of before either. I figured this might come in handy for those needing to automate an SRM deployment given you will need at least two installation: one for the protection site and one for the recovery site. I did not see much documentation on this topic and it has been awhile since I have played with SRM, I thought this would be a good opportunity for some automation goodness as well as checking out some of the new SRM 5.8 features including VSAN support as well as the new vSphere Web Client integration.

In my lab, I wanted to run the a minimal setup and the least amount of Windows 🙂 With that, I was able to use two VCSA, 2 SRM hosts running on Windows 2008 R2 and six Nested ESXi hosts as shown in the diagram below:

To perform a silent installation of SRM, you need to specify a list of 35 parameters to the actual executable which is quite daunting and can also be quite error prone. It actually took me a few tries before I was able to get it working and I wanted to make easier so that anyone can just consume it. I decided to create a simple Windows batch script called install_srm.bat which wraps all the required parameters in a set of variables that can easily be modified by anyone. Out of the 35, only 31 of the parameters can be edited and of those only 15 is really required to be tweaked (which is clearly noted in the script) but also shown below:

SRM_INSTALLER - The full path to the SRM 5.8 installer
DR_TXT_VCHOSTNAME - vCenter Server IP/Hostname
DR_TXT_VCUSR - vCenter Server Username
DR_TXT_VCPWD - vCenter Server Password
VC_CERTIFICATE_THUMBPRINT - vCenter Server SSL SHA1 Thumbprint
DR_TXT_LSN - SRM Local Site Name
DR_TXT_ADMINEMAIL - SRM Admin Email Address
DR_CB_HOSTNAME_IP - SRM Server IP/Hostname
DR_TXT_CERTPWD - SSL Certificate Password
DR_TXT_CERTORG - SSL Certificate Organization Name
DR_TXT_CERTORGUNIT - SSL Certification Organization Unit Name
DR_EMBEDDED_DB_DSN - SRM DB DSN Name
DR_EMBEDDED_DB_USER - SRM DB Username
DR_EMBEDDED_DB_PWD - SRM DB Password
DR_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME - Windows System Account to run SRM Service

Note: To retrieve the vCenter Server SSL Certificate Thumbprint, you can either view the details using a regular web browser as shown in the screenshot below

or you can run the following command on a UNIX/Linux using the openssl utility to extract the thumbprint:

echo -n | openssl s_client -connect [VC-IP-ADDRESS]:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -fingerprint -sha1

Depending on the number of SRM installations you require, you will need to modify the script to perform those additional deployments. As you can see below, I have my two SRM sites implemented. I have also gone ahead and paired both my SRM setups as well as deploy and configure the vSphere Replication 5.8 using the vSphere Web Client. I definitely recommend checking out the latest SRM 5.8 release if you have not already and you may also want to consider using the embedded vPostgres database for future SRM installation to help simplify the deployment and management of SRM.

For those of you who are interested in the variable mappings to the SRM UI installer (which is pretty straight forward), I took screenshots of each step and mapped them for your convenience.