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Project USB to SDDC - Part 2

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In the previous article, I provided some background on the origin of the project. In this article, we will now focus on the technical details and how the solution actually works.

Hardware

This solution was originally developed against an Intel NUC but I had designed it to be generic so that it could run on any system which meets the minimum requirements which is just having two disks (HDD & SSD or two SSDs) which is used to create a vSAN datastore.

Here is the BOM for the Intel NUC that we had used:

During the Sydney VMUG, we had did a live demo using an Intel NUC. Prior to the Melbourne VMUG, fellow VMware colleague Tai Ratcliff reached out and offered to let us borrow his Supermicro kit for the demo which was great as the hardware was much beefier than the NUC. Thanks Tai!


I had already been hearing great things about E200-8D platform but I had not had the opportunity to get my hands on the system to play with. After only spending a little bit of time with the platform while prepping for the VMUG event, I can see why is a pretty slick system for a vSphere/vSAN based home lab, especially if you need to go beyond 32GB of memory which is where the Intel NUCs currently max out at.

The other appealing features for this platform is that it comes with 2x10GbE, 2x1GBe and an IPMI interface for remote management which is a huge benefit for not needing to connect an external monitor and keyboard. The system is also Xeon based w/6-Cores and can go all the way up to 128GB of memory. Tai had also recently published a blog article comparing the Supermicro E200-8D and the Intel NUC, which I think is worth a read if you are deciding between these two platforms.

Note: If you are considering purchasing the Supermicro E200-8D or any other system for that matter, check out this exclusive vGhetto discount here.

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Using the vSphere API in vCenter Server to collect ESXTOP & vscsiStats metrics

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Back in 2013, I wrote two articles here and here on how to use the Service Manager API that was introduced in vSphere 5.1 to remotely collect ESXTOP and vscsiStats metrics. At the time, I was told that this API was only available when connecting directly to an ESXi host using the vSphere API. This was still a huge improvement over the previous method which basically required customers to run the commands locally. For ESXTOP, there was resxtop but it was not available for all platforms and some customers still prefer to use the ESXi Shell's version. When I had learned about this API, I was really hoping I could collect both ESXTOP & vscsiStats metrics using vCenter Server which would remove the need to have direct connectivity to each ESXi host.

Last week, an Engineer came across one of my blog posts related to the Service Manager APIs which helped him with a problem he was trying to solve. In the email conversation, I then came to learn from the Engineer that the the Service Manager API can be used from vCenter Server and going directly to the ESXi host was not necessary. It turns out that the QueryServiceList() method which accepts an array of "location" expects a special keyword prefix appended to the list of ESXi hosts that you wish to use the local Service Manager instances on.

The special keyword prefix is "vmware.host." and this is appended to either the Hostname or IP Address of the ESXi hosts being managed by the vCenter Server. For example, in my environment I have an ESXi host (192.168.1.50) that is managed by my VC and so the location string for that host should be "vmware.host.192.168.1.50". If the method was successfully called, you should get back the two service instances for ESXTOP and vscsiStats for each of the ESXi hosts where you can then perform the metric collection.

I have created two sample pyvmomi scripts which exercises the Service Manager API for ESXTOP and vscsiStats:

Note: For more details on how to use Service Manager API to collect ESXTOP and vscsiStats, please refer to this post here and here.

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Minimum permissions to view VM Storage Policies

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I saw this question from Aaron yesterday while scrolling through my Twitter timeline and after answering it, I figure I write a quick blog post about it in case this comes up in the future.

There are two specific privileges around managing VM Storage Policies: Update and View as shown in the screenshot below. If you only want to allow users to be able to see all the available VM Storage Policies that have been defined, then you just need to create a new Role with only the "View" privilege.

Secondly, it is important to note that VM Storage Policies are defined and managed at a vCenter Server level. This means that when you assign the permission, it needs to be applied at the root vCenter Server level (you do not have to propagate it down wards if you do not wish to show the rest of the vSphere Inventory). Global permissions are not required, but if you have multiple vCenter Servers which are all part of the same SSO Domain, you may want to consider this if users are allowed to login to any one of the vCenter Servers.

Once you have assigned the permission to either the user or group, then you can have them login using either the vSphere Web Client or using the SBPM APIs and you will now be able to view all defined VM Storage Policies.