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Quick Tip - How to mount CIFS & NFS volumes on Photon OS?

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I caught the following tweet from Christian this morning and thought I do a quick blog post on how to mount an external volume like a CIFS or NFS share on VMware's Photon OS.

For mounting an NFS volume, an NFS client is required and this is provided through the nfs-utils package which is not installed by default on Photon OS. To install the package, you just simply need to run the following command:

tdnf -y install nfs-utils cifs-utils

Screen Shot 2016-01-13 at 8.47.11 AM
Once the nfs-utils is installed, you can mount your NFS volume by using the mount command like the following:

mount -t nfs [NFS-SERVER]:/path/to/share /mountpoint

If you want to ensure the volume is automatically mounted, you will need to add an entry to /etc/fstab. If you want more details, you can perform a quick Google search for further instructions

For mounting a CIFS or SMB volume, you need to install cifs-utils package and then specify the "cifs" mount type like the following:

mount -t cifs //[CIFS-SERVER]//path/to/share /mountpoint

If you require authentication to your CIFS or SMB volume, you just need to specify -o username=[USERNAME],password=[PASSWORD]

Lastly, I also want to mention that the instructions above is not specific to Photon OS but applies to any other *Nix platform.

How to create vCenter Alarm to alert on ESXi 5.5u1 NFS APD issue?

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As some of you may have heard, there is currently a known issue with NFS based datastores (includes VSA NFS datastores) after upgrading to vSphere 5.5 Update 1. The issue causes NFS datastores to disconnect and go into an APD (All Paths Down) state. VMware is currently aware of the problem and you can follow KB 2076392 for the latest updates.

While going through my Twitter stream this morning, I noticed an interesting question from fellow Blogger and friend Jase McCarty who asked the following:

vsphere55u1-nfs-apd-alarm-2
I was quite surprised to hear that there were no vCenter Alarms being triggered for this issue. I decided to take a look at the KB to better understand the symptoms and see if there was anything I could do to help. From what I can tell, the only way to identify this particular problem is by looking at the logs which the KB has an example of what you would see.

Once I took a look at the logs, I knew there was at least two methods in which one could get alerts. One option would be to leverage vCenter Log Insight and create a query based on the particular string but no every customer is using Log Insight and it does require a bit of setup. The second more obvious option for me would be to key off of the VMkernel VOBs that are being generated which I have written about in the past for detecting duplicate IP Addresses for ESXi and VSAN component threshold count.

Here are the steps to create vCenter Alarm:

Step 1 - Create a new vCenter Alarm and give it a name. Select "Hosts" for Monitor and "Specific event occurring ..." for Monitor for

vsphere55u1-nfs-apd-alarm-0
Step 2 - For the Trigger, you will add the following VOB entries (just copy/paste them in)

  • esx.problem.storage.apd.start
  • esx.problem.vmfs.nfs.server.disconnect
  • esx.problem.storage.apd.timeout

Note: The alarm will activate if ANY of the VOBs are seen since it is an OR statement. It would have been nice to be able to group these together to generate the alarm

vsphere55u1-nfs-apd-alarm-1
Once the alarm has been created, you will at least have a way to get notified if you are potentially affected by this problem. I would still highly recommend you subscribe to KB 2076392 for all the latest updates.