vcloud director 5.1

vCloud Director Simulator

01.03.2013 by William Lam // 8 Comments

I have received several questions from folks asking if there are other VMware solutions that could work with the vCenter Server Simulator (vcsim) which I recently wrote an article about back in 2012. Well, the answer is I do not know, as other solutions have not really been tested out with vcsim. The goal of vcsim was primarily focused at the vSphere layer and I suspect that other VMware solutions can probably leverage what vcsim has done but probably will not work (today) as some solutions require a fair amount of communication between itself and the vCenter Server. Now having said all that, you might be wondering about the title of this article?

The one solution that I am aware of today that works with vcsim is vCloud Director and this is merely a proof of concept than anything else, so I would like to set the proper (low) expectations. The available functionality from vCloud Director is quite limited when using it with vcsim and I have also ran into several issues which I will go into more detail later. For vCloud Director to be able to consume the simulated inventory from vcsim, a few tweaks are required in both vcsim and the vCloud Director database.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk.

Requirements:

VCSA 5.1 (vCenter Server Appliance)
VCNS 5.1 (vCloud Networking and Security)
VCD 5.1 Appliance
configureVCSimulator.sh script

I highly recommend you take a look at my vCenter Server Simulator article before getting started as it gives you some background that is required later on but you will not be required to configure the VCSA in advanced as there are some additional configurations that are needed. I will also be using the vCloud Director appliance which I recommend for quick ease of deployment and setup.

Configurations:

Step 1 - Deploy VCSA and configure it as you would normally (do not touch the vcsim configurations, as that is handled in the next step using a script that is provided)

Step 2 - Download the configureVCSimulator.sh script and upload it to the VCSA. By default, vcsim's XML configuration files is set to ESXi 4.0 and we will need to adjust the version numbers to reflect either 5.0 or 5.1 as well as modify the hypervisor type from embeddedEsx to esx which is required by the simulator code. Go ahead and run the script on the VCSA which will setup the vcsim as well as modify the necessary files. Once the script has completed, if you wish to change the default inventory, go ahead and modify /etc/vmware-vpx/vcsim/model/initInventory.cfg and then restart the vCenter Server service by running service vmware-vpxd restart

Here is a screenshot of the script running:

Note: If you are interested in the files that are being modified, you can take a look at the shell script for more details.

Step 3 - Deploy and configure VCNS appliance as you would normally. Make sure you also register the vCenter Server in the VCNS UI that you just deployed as this is needed before moving forward to the next step.

Step 4 - Deploy the VCD appliance using the embedded database and power on the system. Once the system is ready, go ahead and SSH to the host, we will need to execute a few SQL queries which will allow vCloud Director to support simulated hosts as well as the particular ESXi versions. First we need to switch over to the Oracle user, run the following command:

su - oracle

Next we will login to the VCD database using sqlplus and the default credentials which should be vcloud/VCloud, run the following command:

sqlplus vcloud/VCloud

The first SQL statement will allow VCD to support simulated ESXi hosts, type in the following SQL statement:

update config set value='1' where name='vzSim50Supported';

The next two SQL statements will define the version of ESXi that VCD will support, type in the following SQL statements that are applicable to you:

insert into os values (seq_config.NextVal, 'vmnix-x86', 'VMware ESX', '5.1.0', 0, 1);
insert into os values (seq_config.NextVal, 'vmnix-x86', 'VMware ESX', '5.0.0', 0, 1);

Finally, we just need to type "quit" to exit from sqplus and then type "exit" to logoff as the oracle user and this will bring us back to root context. The last thing we need to do is restart the vCloud Director service for the changes to go into effect by running the following command

service vmware-vcd restart

Here is a screenshot of running through the VCD database changes:

Step 5 - Once the vCloud Director service has been successfully restarted, we are now ready to setup our vCloud Director Simulator environment. Start off by adding both your VCSA and VCNS to the vCloud Director under Resources tab as you would normally.

Next, click on Provider VDCs to create your Pvdc and when you arrive at the ESXi host preparation step, you can type in anything for the username/password (since these are simulated ESXi host).

After you click next or finish, you then click into the Hosts tab to watch the ESXi host preparation. This is where you will notice the first issue, the preparation should finish almost immediately as thgey are simulated hosts, so no VCD agent is installed or services needing to be enabled, but from what I have seen this process can take up to 30minutes if not longer. You will need to be patient when you get to this point and do not try to cancel the process and just let it sit and finish. To ensure your environment is setup correctly, make sure the following three columns show green check marks: Enable, Ready and Available during the preparation.

This is probably a good time to get some coffee or tea and check out other cool articles on virtuallyghetto.com 😉

Once the ESXi hosts have completed preparation, you should see a green check box under the Status column which means you are now ready to create an Organization which is a pre-requisite before creating an Organization VDC. I will assume you know how to proceed from here and depending if you setup an ESXi 5.0 or ESXi 5.1 environment in vcsim, you will need to choose the appropriate virtual machine compatibility (virtual hardware) to support in your OrgVDC.

Note: If you setup an ESXi 5.0 environment, you may see an error with too many connected datastores, to resolve this, you need to either decrease the number of hosts in your simulated environment or use ESXi 5.1

You can probably guess the last step is to start provisioning VMs/vApps in our vCloud Director instance, but sadly this is where you will face another issue. What I have found is that when you deploy a new vApp, an exception is thrown regarding a NULL pointer and VCD will fail on the deployment.

However, if we take a look at our vcsim environment, you will see that the VM actually does get created but this still poses a problem for us in VCD, as the task is still not considered successful.

I have not been able to figure out why and I know from running through several tests, there was a case where I was able to successfully provision a VM in the VCD simulator. This might be related to the version of virtual hardware selected, I had more luck using either 7 or 8 but not so much with 9. Unfortunately, without provisioning capabilities, this may not be as useful as one would like but I encourage you to still give this a try if you are interested.

The vCloud API can also be access in the simulated environment, but remember that the operations will be limited to what has been shown and will probably work for most of the inventory based API calls, but again, YMMV.

Though vCloud Director Simulator is somewhat limited today and with a few known issues, it is a proof of concept that other VMware solutions can leverage what vcsim has provided as a base foundation. If you think this is something that is useful to have or have other use cases for, please leave a comment. You never know, this could be a VMware Fling one day if there is enough interest from the community.

Nested Virtualization APIs For vSphere & vCloud Director 5.1

10.18.2012 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Did you know with the release of vSphere 5.1 and vCloud Director 5.1, there are now APIs that allow you to enable/disable Nested Virtualization aka (Virtual Hardware Virtualization) on a Virtual Machine?

Disclaimer: Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware.

In the vSphere 5.1 API, there are two new properties related to Nested Virtualization:

nestedHVSupported is a new capability property which indicates whether your physical ESXi 5.1 host supports Nested Virtualization. This property is only true IF your physical CPU supports BOTH Intel-VT/EPT OR AMD-V/RVI. For more details, please refer to this article.
nestedHVEnabled is new property on a Virtual Machine which allows you to enable or disable Nested Virtualization. You will need to ensure you are running a Virtual Machine with ESXi 5.1 Compatibility (e.g. virtual hardware 9) and your physical ESXi 5.1 host supports Nested Virtualization.

Here is a screenshot of performing the same operation manually using the new vSphere Web Client:

In the vCloud Director 5.1 REST API, there two new operations related to Nested Virtualization:

/action/enableNestedHypervisor is a new operation on a Virtual Machine that enables Nested Virtualization. Here is an example using the curl utility enable VHV:
curl -i -k -H "Accept:application/*+xml;version=5.1" -H "x-vcloud-authorization: xX4IrWWi+Ofq77zOqPJaMEYHHJt4jxrwP+ntkO2tecQ=" -X POST https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/vApp/vm-d9870545-a29a-4175-bff4-ae075f1c1bc0/action/enableNestedHypervisor
/action/disableNestedHypervisor is a new operation on a Virtual Machine that disables Nested Virtualization. Here is an example using the curl utility to disable VHV:
curl -i -k -H "Accept:application/*+xml;version=5.1" -H "x-vcloud-authorization: xX4IrWWi+Ofq77zOqPJaMEYHHJt4jxrwP+ntkO2tecQ=" -X POST https://vcd.primp-industries.com/api/vApp/vm-d9870545-a29a-4175-bff4-ae075f1c1bc0/action/disableNestedHypervisor

Here is a screenshot of performing the same operation manually using the vCloud Director UI:

If you plan to leverage Nested Virtualization in your environment, you now have simple way of automating this feature for Virtual Machines that you wish to support Nested Virtualization.

Having Difficulties Enabling Nested ESXi in vSphere 5.1?

09.29.2012 by William Lam // 21 Comments

I noticed there were a few folks having some difficulties enabling Nested ESXi (VHV Virtual Hardware Virtualization) in the latest release of ESXi 5.1 and I thought I share some additional info and tips on troubleshooting your setup in case you are running into similar problems.

*** DISCLAIMER **** This is not officially supported by VMware, do not bother asking if it is supported or calling into VMware support for details or help.

If you wish to run nested ESXi or other hypervisors on ESXi 5.1 and run 32-bit nested virtual machines, you must meet the following hardware requirement:

CPU supporting Intel VT-x or AMD-V

If you wish to run nested 64-bit virtual machines in your nested ESXi or other hypervisors, in addition to the requirement above, you must also meet the following hardware requirement:

CPU supporting Intel EPT or AMD RVI

If you only meet the first criteria, you CAN still install nested ESXi or other hypervisors on ESXi 5.1, BUT you will only be able to run 32-bit nested virtual machines. When you create your virtual machine shell using the new vSphere Web Client, in the expanded CPU view, the "Hardware Virtualization" box will be grayed out. This is expected as you do not have full support for VHV, but you can still continue with your installation of ESXi or other hypervisors.

In ESXi 5.0, you may have been able to run 64-bit nested virtual machines without EPT/RVI support but performance was extremely poor. With ESXi 5.1, VHV now requires EPT/RVI.

Note: During the installation of ESXi, you may see the following message "No Hardware Virtualization Support", you can just ignore it.

If you are using sites such as Intel's ark.intel.com to check your CPU requirements, be aware that it is COMMON even for the hardware vendors to publish incorrect information about their websites. However, there is a quick way you can validate on your ESXi host whether you have full VHV support.

In vSphere 5.1, there is a new capability property called nestedHVSupported which specifies whether your physical ESXi 5.1 host has full VHV support. This property will only be true IF your CPU has both Intel-VT+EPT or AMD-V+RVI. A quick and easy way to validate this is using the vSphere MOB to retrieve the value.

To check nestedHVSupported property, please enter the following into a web browser (substitute the IP Address/hostname of your ESXi host):

https://himalaya.primp-industries.com/mob/?moid=ha-host&doPath=capability

After you login, search for the nestedHVSupported property on the page and you should see a value of either true or false. As mentioned earlier, if it is false, you might still be able to install nested ESXi or other hypervisors but you will not be able to run nested 64-bit virtual machines. I would also recommend taking a look at your system BIOS to ensure things like Intel-VT/EPT and AMD-V/RVI are enabled and sometimes it might just be as simple as a BIOS upgrade (you can always confirm by contacting the hardware vendor if you have further questions).

For proper networking connectivity, also ensure that either your standard vSwitch or Distributed Virtual Switch has both promiscuous mode and forged transmit enabled either globally on the portgroup or distributed portgroup your nested ESXi hosts are connected to.

Additional Resources: