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PowerCLI module for Proactive HA (including simulation)

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Proactive HA is a very cool new feature that was introduced in vSphere 6.5, which enables our hardware vendors to communicate their hardware specific health information directly into vSphere and specifically with vSphere DRS. This hardware health information can then be leveraged by vSphere DRS to take proactive actions to guard against potential hardware failures. Brian Graf, Product Manager for Proactive HA, DRS and overall vSphere Availability has a nice blog post here where he goes into more details on how Proactive HA works.

As Brian mentioned, a few of our select hardware vendors are already in the process of developing and certifying Proactive HA integrations for vSphere, so stay tuned for those announcements in the future by both VMware and our partners. In the meantime, there was an interesting comment from one of our field folks asking whether it would be possible to "simulate" the new Quarantine Mode operation for an ESXi host to be better understand how this feature might work?

Quarantine Mode is new mode for ESXi, which can only be triggered by Proactive HA. It functions similar to the Maintenance Mode operation, but instead of migrating all VMs off, it will allow existing VMs to continue to run but prevent additional new VMs to be placed on the host.

Proactive HA does provide a set of public vSphere APIs under the healthUpdateManager which is primarily targeted at our hardware vendors to consume. However, these APIs could also be used by our customers to get visibility into the current Proactive HA configuration as well as the health of the ESXi hosts from the Proactive HA provider standpoint. Going back to our initial question, it is possible to "register" a fake Proactive HA provider and manually generate health updates to simulate what a real Proactive HA solution could look like.

Disclaimer: This is for educational and lab purposes only. Creating a fake or simulated Proactive HA provider is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk. The creation of Proactive HA providers as well as publishing health updates is for our hardware vendors to consume which in turn will provide native integrations that include customer visible interfaces within the vSphere Web Client.

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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 9

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In Part 9, we were initially going to cover the new backup and restore capability that was introduced in vSphere 6.5 for the VCSA. However, it looks like Brian Graf has already created an awesome PowerCLI module (Backup-VCSA.psm1) that can be used to backup the VCSA, which you can find more details here.

While going through the VAMI APIs for the backup feature, I did notice there was one interesting backup VAMI API that Brian may not have looked at, at least I did not see a function consuming this API. Prior to initiating a backup for either a VCSA or PSC, you can query the expected size of the backup. This information can be pretty helpful beyond just for backups, but understanding the size of your system at any point in time.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

The backup and restore feature for the VCSA is located in the VAMI UI, but there is not a UI for retrieving the current expected backup size.

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/recovery/backup/parts

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output

The output is pretty straight forward, it provides the total expected backup size (MB) as well as the breakdown of the total size into "configuration" data and the "Stats, Events, Alarms and Tasks" (SEAT) data.


With this new API, you can now easily see how large your vCenter Server Database is and take appropriate action such as truncating the data or reducing the retention period which can especially help with the performance of vCenter Server as well as the time it takes during upgrades.

What logs do I get when I enable syslog in VCSA 6.5?

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The native remote syslog functionality in the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) for vSphere 6.5 introduces several new changes from vSphere 6.0. With some of the questions that I have been receiving on this topic, I figure it would be useful to take a closer look at some of the different behaviors and configuration differences. Hopefully by the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of the syslog capabilities in VCSA 6.5

Remote Syslog Configuration

In VCSA 6.0, to configure the remote syslog configuration, you needed to use the vSphere Web Client. Although this may have felt like a convenience, it also added an unnecessary dependency on both vCenter Single-Sign On (SSO) and the vSphere Web Client UI. In VCSA 6.5, the remote syslog configurations is now part of the VAMI UI (https://[VCSA]:5480) which is an out-of-band interface that can still function if either SSO or vCenter Server is down. Once you have saved your changes, the syslog client will automatically be restarted for the changes to go into effect. If you wish to disable the remote syslog functionality, simply click on the reset button.


Note: If you decide to use port 1514, I have found that you must use the TLS protocol rather than TCP or else it will not work.

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