Search Results for: nested esxi

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.

Handy VSAN VOBs for creating vCenter Alarms

04.22.2014 by William Lam // 3 Comments

There have been quite a few questions lately around vCenter Server Alarms for VSAN, one in particular that I have noticed is around individual disk failure for VSAN. Outside of the generic default datastore alarms, there seems to be only two VSAN specific alarms:

I figure there must be other useful alarms that we could create, especially after showing how you can create a vCenter Server Alarm to monitor the VSAN component count threshold based on a particular VSAN VOB. I took a look around and found the following VSAN specific VOBs which could be useful for creating additional vCenter Alarms.

VOB ID	VOB Description
esx.audit.vsan.clustering.enabled	VSAN clustering services have been enabled.
esx.clear.vob.vsan.pdl.online	VSAN device has come online.
esx.clear.vsan.clustering.enabled	VSAN clustering services have now been enabled.
esx.clear.vsan.vsan.network.available	VSAN now has at least one active network configuration.
esx.clear.vsan.vsan.vmknic.ready	A previously reported vmknic now has a valid IP.
esx.problem.vob.vsan.lsom.componentthreshold	VSAN Node: Near node component count limit.
esx.problem.vob.vsan.lsom.diskerror	VSAN device is under permanent error.
esx.problem.vob.vsan.lsom.diskgrouplimit	Failed to create a new disk group.
esx.problem.vob.vsan.lsom.disklimit	Failed to add disk to disk group.
esx.problem.vob.vsan.pdl.offline	VSAN device has gone offline.
esx.problem.vsan.clustering.disabled	VSAN clustering services have been disabled.
esx.problem.vsan.lsom.congestionthreshold	VSAN device Memory/SSD congestion has changed.
esx.problem.vsan.net.not.ready	A vmknic added to VSAN network configuration doesn't have valid IP. Network is not ready.
esx.problem.vsan.net.redundancy.lost	VSAN doesn't haven any redundancy in its network configuration.
esx.problem.vsan.net.redundancy.reduced	VSAN is operating on reduced network redundancy.
esx.problem.vsan.no.network.connectivity	VSAN doesn't have any networking configuration for use.
esx.problem.vsan.vmknic.not.ready	A vmknic added to VSAN network configuration doesn't have valid IP. It will not be in use.

Looking at the list above, the following two VOBs seems like they would be useful for alerting on a disk failure is:

esx.problem.vob.vsan.lsom.diskerror
esx.problem.vob.vsan.pdl.offline

Disclaimer: There are no guarantees that a disk error or failure will automatically trigger these VOBs due to the unknown nature of how a disk may be fail, especially if it is intermittently.

Even though we can not simulate a disk error on a physical disk, we can still do some magic using a Nested VSAN environment. The worse case scenario that you could run into is that one of the disk just goes completely offline. We can simulate a similar behavior in a Nested ESXi environment by removing one of the virtual disks from the Virtual Machine (not deleting it).

To demonstrate the following scenario, here are the steps to create a vCenter Alarm for the following two VOBs:

Step 1 - Create a new vCenter Alarm and give it a name. Select “Hosts” for Monitor and “Specific event occurring …” for Monitor:

Step 2 - Add the following two VOBs above into the Event trigger:

Step 3 - Remove one of the Virtual Disks (SSD/MD) from the Virtual Machine running the Nested ESXi VM.

Step 4 - There are two ways in which you can trigger the alarm. You can either create a new Virtual Machine which will try to write to the Nested ESXi VM in which you remove the Virtual Disk or you can rescan the storage adapter for the Nested ESXi VM. In my environment, I happen to have a VM running on an NFS datastore and I performed a Storage vMotion of the VM onto my VSAN Datastore using the default FTT=1 policy on a three node VSAN Cluster. This immediately triggered the alarm as seen in the screenshots below: