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Apple Mac Pro 6,1 PCIe SSD issue resolved w/ESXi 6.0 Update 2

03.15.2016 by William Lam // 6 Comments

Early last year, the new Apple Mac Pro 6,1 (aka black can design) was certified and fully supported on vSphere 6.0 which I had blogged about here. Several months later, customers discovered that some of the newer Mac Pro 6,1 units were shipping with different model of their PCIe SSD device than what was originally released at GA. This was problematic because ESXi was not aware of this newer device and could not detect during or after installation. Although a work around was identified for customers looking to install either ESXi 5.x or 6.x on the newer Apple Mac Pros, it definitely was not ideal.

It has taken a bit longer than expected, but the issue has now been resolved with the latest release of ESXi 6.0 Update 2. A similar fix will be available for customers running ESXi 5.5 in a future update. You can find the direct download for ESXi 6.0 Update 2 in link below which includes a pointer to the release notes in case you are interested in other fixes included in this release.

  • vSphere ESXi 6.0u2 - https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=ESXI60U2&productId=491&rPId=10348

Categories // Apple, ESXi, vSphere Tags // apple, ESXi, mac pro, ssd, vSphere 6.0 Update 2

Quick stats for the VSAN HCL

06.13.2014 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I noticed there was a new blog post this morning from Wade Holmes on an update to the VSAN HCL and I thought it might be useful to provide some quick stats on all the partners who have supported components listed on the VSAN HCL such as the storage controllers, SSDs and MDs. As of today (06/13/14), the information below is the latest from the VSAN HCL. I will make adjustments to the Google doc as updates are made to the VSAN HCL.

Disclaimer: The VMware VSAN HCL should still be used as the official source when selecting components for your VSAN environment.

Total VSAN Storage Controllers: 89
GDoc for All VSAN Controllers - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FHnGAHdQdCbmNJMyze-bmpTZ3cMjKrwLtda1Ry32bAQ

Vendor Controllers
Cisco 2
Dell 5
Fujitsu 11
HP 7
IBM 6
Intel 18
LSI 37
SuperMicro 3

Note: If you would like to help contribute to the "Community" VSAN storage controller queue depth list, please take a look at this article for more details.

Total VSAN SSDs: 110
GDoc for All VSAN SSDs - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FHnGAHdQdCbmNJMyze-bmpTZ3cMjKrwLtda1Ry32bAQ/edit#gid=858526558

Vendor SSDs
Cisco 5
Dell 15
EMC 5
Fujitsu 4
Fusion-IO 15
Hitachi 9
HP 15
IBM 9
Intel 12
Micron 7
Samsung 3
SanDisk 6
Virident Systems 5

Total VSAN MDs: 97
GDoc for All VSAN MDs - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FHnGAHdQdCbmNJMyze-bmpTZ3cMjKrwLtda1Ry32bAQ/edit#gid=1993745998 

Vendor MDs
Cisco 8
Dell 20
Fujitsu 13
Hitachi 1
HP 19
IBM 20
Lenovo 3
Seagate 13

Categories // VSAN, vSphere 5.5 Tags // ESXi 5.5, hdd, md, ssd, storage controller, VSAN, vSphere 5.5

How to run Nested ESXi on the vCloud Hybrid Service?

05.02.2014 by William Lam // 7 Comments

nested-esxi-on-vchsToday I was granted access to VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service and the first order of business for me of course, was to provision a Nested ESXi VM! After going through the vCHS UI (which is very slick and easy to use by the way) and the vCloud Director UI, I realized the ESXi guestOS type has not been enabled on the backend of the vCloud Director Database. This totally makes sense, as vCHS is a production ready service and they definitely would not want to run anything that is not officially supported.

Having said that, I can see the benefits to customers who would like build out a Nested ESXi environment on vCHS for lab purposes instead of having to manage their own. Some customers even leverage Nested ESXi as part of their development and testing of software and it can be challenging at times to quickly spin up a brand new environment. Instead, they go to vCHS and with just a couple of of clicks in the UI or automatically using the vCloud APIs, provision a couple of Nested ESXi instances for testing. You can easily discard the resources once you are done or keep them running a bit longer.

Having worked with vCloud Director in the past, I knew that you could import an OVF/OVA and I thought maybe I could just import the Nested ESXi OVF templates that I built and potentially workaround vCHS "limitation" 🙂

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware nor is it supported on vCHS

I tried to upload one of the OVF templates that I built, but it turns out vCloud Director does not supported the Dynamic Disks feature, so I had to perform two additional steps.

Step 1 - Download one of the following Nested ESXi OVF templates

  • Single Nested ESXi VM Template
  • 3-Node VSAN Nested ESXi VM Template
  • 32-Node VSAN Nested ESXi VM Template

Step 2 - Import the OVF template in an existing vSphere environment and ensure you are doing so using the vSphere Web Client, as some of the properties may not be imported properly

Step 3 - Once deployed, go ahead and re-export the image to an OVF/OVA (I choose OVA as it is a single file) and this will generate the empty VMDKs for you so the image should still be very small (< 1MB)

Step 4 - Login into to your vCHS account and  click on your Virtual Datacenter. Select Virtual Machines and then click on Manage in vCloud Director. Import the OVF/OVA that you have just exported

Step 5 - Once the import has been completed, you now have a Virtual Machine that has been configured with the correct guestOS type which should be VMware ESXi 5.x as seen in the screenshot below

nested-esxi-on-vchs-2
Step 6 - At this point, you can either mount an ESXi ISO over your browser or upload it into the vCloud Director Catalog so you can mount it locally and begin your installation of ESXi. Below is a screenshot of 3 Nested ESXi VMs running on vCHS

nested-esxi-on-vchs-3
Note: It looks like some of the advanced VM settings that are part of my OVF template are ignored as part of the vCloud Director import. This means that if you would like to run a Nested VSAN environment on vCHS, you will not be able to rely on the SSD emulation setting but instead, you will need to run through the ESXCLI claim rules to mark particular disks as "SSD" devices. It would have been really nice if vCloud Director would preserve all the advanced VM settings but at least you can still run a Nested VSAN environment.

So there you have it, Nested ESXi running on vCHS! I am kind of curious if this is the first instance of a Nested ESXi VM running on vCHS without having admin access on the backend system?

Note: One limitation to be aware of is that since the backend of vCloud Director is not properly enabled for Nested Virtualization support, this means you will NOT be able to run Nested VMs on top of the Nested ESXi instances. This is due to the lack of having Network Pool which has both Promiscuous & Forge Transmits enabled which is a requirement for proper Nested VMs connectivity. I wonder if vCHS should provide Nested Virtualization capabilities? I know I definitely would like to see it, what do you think? Leave a comment if you have some thoughts on this topic.

UPDATE (05/4/14) - If you wish to run a Nested VSAN environment on vCHS, you will need to take a look at this blog post here on how to "fake" an SSD on one of the devices by using ESXCLI claim rules. The rason for this is that you will not be able to leverage the other method of emulating an SSD device via advanced setting as that requires access to the underlying vSphere environment which you will not have in vCHS.

Categories // ESXi, Nested Virtualization, VSAN, vSphere Tags // ESXi, nested, nested virtualization, ssd, vCHS, vcloud hybrid service, VSAN

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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