hcl

Updating the VSAN HCL & Release Catalog DB using VSAN API

06.15.2020 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Both the VSAN Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and the VSAN Release Catalog database which provides VSAN build recommendations should be updated periodically to ensure that you have the latest VSAN recommendations from VMware. In addition to using the vSphere UI to perform these update, customers can also automate either of these tasks using the VSAN Management API which can be consumed using any of the supported VSAN Management SDKs including PowerCLI.

I recently had a question about which VSAN API to use to update VSAN Release Catalog.

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How to check when the VSAN Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is updated?

03.13.2018 by William Lam // 1 Comment

While catching up on emails from being out on paternity leave, I came across a VSAN HCL feature request that I had filed in early December of last year. I was pleasantly surprise to see that it had been marked resolved. The VSAN Hardware Compatibility List is continuously being updated to include new hardware platforms and components that have been certified by our hardware vendors.

This of course is great news for our customers, but one challenge that I have heard on several occasion is how to keep up with the changes, especially the addition of new components? The VSAN HCL allows you to subscribe and get notification on individual components which is useful to get the latest recommendation. However, in the case of new components being add or even removed, there is no easy solution and most folks resort to manually checking the VSAN HCL by hand.

VSAN itself does include an HCL healthcheck, which you can have it directly pull the latest VSAN HCL JSON from VMware's website, although this may not always be possible for customers without direct or proxy access to the internet. This means for customers who may have dark sites, they must periodically download the latest VSAN HCL JSON and distribute that throughout their vCenter Server, where as a more ideal solution is to only push the update when a new JSON has been provided by VMware.

My feature request was quite simple, it asks for a method in which customers can easily subscribe and get notified of when the VSAN HCL database has been updated. This has been delivered as a tiny RSS feed service.

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How to download offline VSAN HCL file for VSAN Health Check Plugin?

05.16.2015 by William Lam // 4 Comments

One of the coolest features in the new VSAN Health Check Plugin is the automatic verification of your underlying hardware (hosts, disks, storage controller & drivers) by automatically checking it against VMware's VSAN HCL (Hardware Compatibility List).

The VSAN HCL database can either be downloaded automatically from VMware.com or manually uploaded if you do not have direct or proxy internet access. There was a question this morning on Twitter asking where the offline VSAN HCL file be downloaded from? I was actually curious as well and looking at Cormac Hogan's excellent VSAN Health Check documentation, I found the answer at the very end of the document 🙂

http://partnerweb.vmware.com/service/vsan/all.json

To download the offline VSAN HCL file which is actually is just a JSON file, you just need to load the above URL into a web browser and then save the file.

After you have downloaded the VSAN HCL file, you can either upload using the vSphere Web Client under the "Health" section of the VSAN Health Plugin or you using the following RVC command and specifying the path to the file:

vsan.health.hcl_update_db /localhost/ -l /root/all.json

As a bonus, I also had some fun parsing the VSAN HCL JSON file. Below is a graph that I was able to generate after extracting some useful information using the following script found here.