configuration maximum

New VMware Configuration Maximum Tool

04.13.2018 by William Lam // 1 Comment

VMware has just released a new web-based tool that will enable customers to easily view and compare product configuration maximums across different VMware product versions. You can access the easy to remember URL by going to: https://configmax.vmware.com

In this first release of this tool, customers will have the ability to look up configuration maximums for vSphere (includes VSAN) which will initially support vSphere 6.0, vSphere 6.5, vSphere 6.5 Update 1 & the recently released vSphere 6.7 as well as comparing across versions. To view the existing vSphere configuration maximum, simply click on the "Get Started" button.

As you can see from the screenshot below, you now have a single place where you can view the vSphere configuration maximums across different versions. Once you have selected the target version, you can either view all maximums or you can selectively choose the sections you are interested in.

The other really neat feature is the ability to compare the configuration maximums across different vSphere versions. This is really useful for customers to be able to quickly tell what improvements and enhancements have been made, especially as customers plan for vSphere upgrades. To begin, simply click on the "Compare Limits" button at the top. Next, select the target vSphere version and then you can add one or more versions to compare against.

Once you click on the Compare button, a new window will popup providing you the comparison between the target and selected vSphere versions. You can quickly see how the maximums have changed across these vSphere versions. You can even export the results to Excel by click on export option on the upper right hand corner and you be prompted to save a CSV file.

I can tell you, this definitely beats having to manually Google for the correct vSphere configuration maximum document since I can never remember the long URL to the static PDF documents! I am excited to see the improved user experience when consuming our product maximums and I know the team will be working on adding more products and features in the future. Definitely keep an eye on this site and also be sure to update your bookmarks. If you have any feedback or things you would like to see, feel free to leave a comment and I will make sure it reaches the Product and Development teams.

VSAN vCheck Plugins

04.07.2014 by William Lam // 5 Comments

After creating my VSAN Configuration Maximum query script I thought it would also be useful to create an equivalent set of VSAN vCheck Plugins. For those of you who have not heard of or used vCheck (pretty rare unless you do not use PowerShell/PowerCLI in your environment), it is a PowerShell reporting HTML framework created by Alan Renouf. vCheck allows you to schedule a series of PowerCLI scripts/checks against your vSphere environment and produces a daily report on the things you care most about such as datastore capacity being under a certain threshold or potential snapshots growing out of control in your environment.

Given this is the primary use case for vCheck, I figure it would make sense to implement these same set of VSAN configuration maximum checks in vCheck as well. This would also give me the opportunity to learn more about vCheck as I have never used it before. If you are new to vCheck, I highly recommend you check out Jonathan Medd's article on how to get started with vCheck here.

Here is a sample report of a real VSAN environment to get an idea of what the report could look like: VSAN-vCheck-Report.html

Below are the VSAN vCheck Plugins that I have created which also includes a bonus plugin which reports on the capacity of a VSAN Datastore. You can pick and choose the VSAN plugins that you want to use in your environment and then customize the threshold parameter for each report based on your requirements.

For those of you who are looking to evaluate VSAN in their environment, hopefully these VSAN vCheck reports will come in handy. If there are others that you feel that might be useful, feel free to leave a comment or contribute back to the vCheck project on Github.

VSAN Configuration Maximum Query Script

03.31.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

In addition to the vSphere Web Client, a great way to further explore VSAN in greater depth is by leveraging RVC and the new VSAN namespace on the command-line. If you have not played with the new the VSAN commands in RVC, Florian Grehl has written a fantastic series that is worth checking out here. While exploring the VSAN commands myself, one command that particularly stood out to me was the vsan.check_limits. The command provides a quick summary of the internal VSAN limits based on your current VSAN Cluster and configuration.

This actually got me thinking about the vSphere Configuration Maximums for VSAN and how manual of a process it is today to validate that you are currently running within the supported maximums not only for VSAN but for other areas as well. I thought it would be useful have a script that you could periodically validate the current VSAN configuration maximums against an existing VSAN Cluster. Creating this script was also a nice way for me to take what I have learned about the VSAN APIs over these last couple of weeks in my Exploring VSAN APIs series and build something that could be useful.

Disclaimer: These scripts are provided for informational and educational purposes only. It should be thoroughly tested before attempting to use in a production environment.

I created a vSphere SDK for Perl called vsanConfigMaximumCheck.pl which just accepts the name of a VSAN Cluster and will automatically check the current VSAN configuration maximums which I pulled out of the latest vSphere 5.5 Configuration Maximums document. It implements the majority of the configuration maximums that I thought made sense to display. This script works on any system with the vSphere SDK for Perl installed but does require one additional Perl Module called JSON. The script reports on the following VSAN configuration maximums:

VSAN Disk Groups per Host
Magnetic Disk per Disk Group
SSD Disks per Disk Group
Total Magnetic Disks in all Disk Groups per Host
Components per VSAN Host
Total VSAN nodes in VSAN Cluster
VMs per VSAN Cluster

Note: I also have plans on creating a VSAN vCheck report which is something I am still working on. Hopefully you will hear more about that very soon 🙂

Here is an example of running the script against VSAN Cluster called "VSAN-Cluster" by using the following command:

./vsanConfigMaximumCheck.pl --server vcenter55-1.primp-industries.com --username root --cluster VSAN-Cluster

Here is a screenshot of what the results would look like:

I personally think this information would be really useful to include in the vsan.check_limits RVC command but I also think it would be useful to have outside of RVC for any type of external reporting which can also leverage the vSphere API.