WilliamLam.com

ATTO's ESXi Thunderbolt Driver is now officially on VMware HCL

by // 1 Comment

Last week I had received some great news from our friends over at ATTO Technology that their ESXi Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel Driver has passed the VMware Certification process and is now officially listed on VMware's HCL. I had known the team was planning to certify their driver but was not aware of their timelines and whether it would actually get accepted given the fact that this was for a Thunderbolt-based device, which is the first of its kind for the VMware HCL.

Funny enough, it was roughly around this time last year that ATTO released a Beta of their ESXi Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel Driver which I had shared with my readers here. I was not surprised by the demand given the fact that no official solutions exists for customers who would like to take advantage of their existing SAN-based storage infrastructure when virtualizing Apple macOS (iOS development, etc) on vSphere. ATTO has certified two of their ThunderLink devices, customers have the option of using either the TLFC2082 which provides 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 (2-port) to 8Gb/s FC (2-Port) Device or the TLFC2182 which provides 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 (2-port) to 16Gb/s FC (2-Port) Device which is supported from ESXi 5.5u3 all the way up to latest 6.5u1 release.


Click here for the direct link to VMware HCL.

Huge congrats to the ATTO team for getting this on the VMware HCL and partnering up with VMware to provide a solution for our customers who virtualize Apple macOS using vSphere!

Lastly, if you are going to be at VMworld and you are interested in learning more about this solution, be sure to drop by the ATTO booth.

PowerCLI script to help correlate vCenter, ESXi & vSAN build/versions w/o manual VMware KB lookup

by // 10 Comments

I can still remember when I was a VI Admin and how annoying it was to try to correlate the build numbers for my ESX(i) hosts and vCenter Servers that I have deployed with the versions listed on VMware's website. This especially gets challenging when there are multiple patch releases (a, b, c or 01, 02, 03) in between major releases (5.5, 6.0, 6.0u1, 6.0u2, 6.5, etc.). Historically, most customers including myself would retrieve the respective build numbers and then manually comparing them to either the release notes and/or download website which was very tedious.

Although VMware has exposed the version number within our vSphere products since day 1 which can also be retrieved programmatically using the vSphere API (here), it unfortunately does not provide more details than simply the major/minor version (e.g. 5,5, 6.0, 6.5, etc) of the software. Recently, VMware had released a series of VMware KBs which provides a mapping between the build numbers for vCenter Server, ESXi and vSAN to their respective versions which can be found in the links below:

These are definitely a great set of resources that I know many customers including myself have been using since its release. Having said that, the process today is still pretty manual since you need to manually retrieve the build numbers for either a VC, ESXi or vSAN Host (can be automated using vSphere APIs) and then comparing that to the KBs to get the correct versions. How cool would it be if you could *easily* just point to YOUR environment and retrieve the version information for either a vCenter Server (Windows or VCSA), ESXi host(s) or vSAN host(s) without needing to manually perform this lookup each time? Well, I have just done that! I have taken all three KBs and converted that information into a simple PowerCLI script called VCESXivSANBuildVersion.ps1 leveraging our vSphere API and it provides three functions:

  • Get-VCVersion - Retrieves the vCenter Server version given a VC connection
  • Get-ESXiVersion - Retrieves the ESXi version for all hosts given a vSphere Cluster
  • Get-VSANVersion - Retrieves the vSAN version for all hosts given a vSAN Cluster

Here is an example output using the first two functions:


For the vCenter Server version output, you will notice that I am also including the OS platform of your vCenter Server, so you can distinguish between a Windows vCenter Server and a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) which can be useful to see if you have been #migrate2vcsa ;). For the ESXi version output, you will notice the "OriginalInstallDate" value, this is actually new API property that was introduced in vSphere 6.5 and it provides you with the original installation date of your ESXi host (more details can be found here) which is pretty neat.

Here is an example output using last function:


If you wanted to take this a step further, you could even take this output and dynamically update the vSphere UI using either Custom Attributes or vSphere Tags so you know what version the software is at any given moment. Its easy enough to set this up as a scheduled task that could run periodically so you always have the latest information provided in the vSphere UIs.

Although this is a significant improvement over the existing manual methods, I think most of you will agree that it would be ideal if this information was natively available within the product which means BOTH UI and APIs. I think we all appreciate versioning of software is not always easy and it can change from release to release for a variety of reasons, most of which may not be technical. If the vSphere platform could dynamically pull this information in either real time and/or through an offline mechanism and provide this association by default, it would greatly improve the experience when needing to troubleshoot or perform maintenance of the vSphere platform. If this is something you would like to see, please leave a comment below providing your feedback. I know I have already pinged our PMs about this and I am sure they would love to hear form you as well!

Additional Information:

Note1: Update levels can be found using the vSphere API, take a look at this article here for more details.

Note2: As of ESXi 6.5 Update 1, the Update levels are also included by default in the Embedded Host Client as shown in the screenshot below:

Note3: As of vSAN 6.2, the vSAN Management API already includes vSAN version information that can be queried. Take a look at this script here which exercises this new API. For example above, I decided to not use this new API since customers may be running older releases of vSAN which is not covered by the vSAN Mgmt API.

Note4: VMware has also published simliar build to version mapping for other VMware products which can find the complete list here.

ESXi Learnswitch – Enhancement to the ESXi MAC Learn DvFilter

by // 23 Comments

The ESXi MAC Learn dvFilter Fling was released a little over two years ago and it has become a must have when it comes to running our ESXi Hypervisor within a VM, also referred to as Nested ESXi. The reason this Fling has become such a popular hit amongst our customers and partners is that it greatly improves the performance when “Promiscuous Mode” is enabled on a Virtual or Distributed Virtual Portgroup, which is a requirement for using Nested ESXi. Although this Fling works great, there are a couple of limitations with this solution today. The first of which is called out in the original Fling release notes, that once a MAC Address has been learned, it never ages out which is not ideal for long running Nested ESXi environments that generates a large amount of new MAC Addresses. The second, is the lack of vMotion support where the learned MAC Address table is not transfered to the destination ESXi host and must be re-learned.

To help address both of these limitations, the folks over in the Network and Security Business Unit (NSBU) have been working hard to improve upon the existing solution and have developed a new native MAC Learning VMkernel module called the Learnswitch. This new Learnswitch not only helps improves Nested ESXi workloads but it can also potentially benefit other workloads such as Nested Containers or other 3rd Party network inspection software. One immediate difference from the previous MAC Learn dvFilter solution is that rather than operating on the Network IO Chain, the filtering is now performed within the outer virtual switch layer itself which will provide some additional performance gains. The other added benefit from an internal VMware standpoint is that the Learnswitch is now vmkapi compatible, which means we will have a better backwards compatible story for supporting old releases of ESXi. One downside to this new solution compared to the previous one is that because the dvFilter operated below the virtual switch layer, it could support both a Virtual Standard Switch as well as the Distributed Virtual Switch. With the new Learnswitch, a Distributed Virtual Switch will be required. If you currently do not meet the requirements of the new Learnswitch, you can continue using the dvFilter, but it is recommended that you do not mix both on a single system but you can definitely make use of both solutions across different ESXi hosts depending on the constraints of your environment.

Here are some of the new capabilities provided by the new Learnswitch module:

  • Overlay Network based that learning and filtering are done in Etherswitch forwarding check
  • MAC Address learning is based on VLAN ID or VXLAN ID on uplink and leaf port
  • Packet is filtered on uplink and leaf port if the MAC is learned on a different port
  • MAC Address table size is 32k per system
  • MAC Address aging support with default aging time of 5 minutes and configurable
  • Unknown unicast packet is flooded by default and configurable to drop
  • vMotion support that the MAC table learned on the port is transferred to destination host and RARP packet is sent
  • Standalone VMkernel module available as a VIB
  • net-learnswitch CLI to display MAC Address table, configuration and stats

[Read more...]