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Increasing disk capacity simplified with VCSA 6.0 using LVM autogrow

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With previous releases of the VCSA, increasing disk capacity was not a very straight forward process. Even though you could easily increase the size of the underlying VMDK while the VCSA was running, increasing the guestOS filesystem was not as seamless. In fact, the process was to add a new VMDK, format it and then copy the contents from the old disk to the new disk as detailed in VMware KB 2056764. This meant with previous releases of VCSX 5.x, you would need to incur downtime of your environment and it could be also be quite significant depending on your familiarity with the steps mentioned in the KB not to mention the time it took to copy the data.

UPDATE (12/06/16) - For VCSA 6.5 deployments, please refer to the article here as the instructions have changed since VCSA 6.0.

The reason for this unnecessary complexity is that VCSA did not take advantage of a Logical Volume Manager (LVM) for managing its disks. In VCSA 6.0, LVM is now used to make it extremely easy to increase disk capacity while the VCSA is running. VCSA 6.0 further simplifies this by separating out the various functions into their own disk partitions comprised of 11 VMDKs compared to the monolithic design in previous VCSA releases. This not only allows you to increase capacity for specific a partition but you can also now attach specific storage SLA's using VM Storage Policies on specific VMDKs such as the Database or Log VMDK for example.

In the example below, I will walk through the process of increasing the DB VMDK from the existing 10GB to 20GB while the vCenter Server is still running.

Step 1 - Verify the existing disk capacity using "df -h"

increase-vmdk-in vcsa-01
Step 2 - Increase the capacity on VMDK 6 which represents the DB partition using the vSphere Web/C# Client.

Step 3 - Once the VMDK has been increased, you will need to run the following command in the VCSA which will automatically expand any Logical Volumes that have had their Physical Volumes increased:

vpxd_servicecfg storage lvm autogrow

increase-vmdk-in vcsa-02
Step 4 - Confirm the newly added capacity has been consumed

increase-vmdk-in vcsa-03
If you would like to learn more about the different VMDK structure in the new VCSA 6.0, I will be sharing more details in a future article.

Ultimate automation guide to deploying VCSA 6.0 Part 0

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With vSphere 6.0, there is a new deployment model for vCenter Server which is comprised of following two core components:

  • Platform Services Controller (PSC) Node - Provides VMware Infrastructure services such as vCenter Single Sign-On, vSphere Licensing and VMware Certificate Authority Management (VCMA)
  • vCenter Server Management Node - Provides vCenter Server Service, Inventory Service, vSphere Web Client, vPostgres DB, vSphere Syslog Collector, vSphere Auto Deploy, and vSphere Dump Collector Services

From these two components, there are three deployment types (also shown in the diagrams below):

  1. Embedded Node - Both the Platform Services Controller and vCenter Server Management Node reside on a single system, this is true for both the Windows vCenter Server and the VCSA
  2. External Platform Services Controller Node - You can deploy multiple PSC's and configure them with independent SSO Domains or have them all joined to a single SSO Domain, replicating between each other
  3. vCenter Server Management Node - This requires that you have deployed an external PSC which the vCenter Server can point to

vcsa-6.0-deployment-options-new-2There are currently two supported methods of deploying the VCSA 6.0 Appliance which is using the new HTML based UI (Supported only on Windows) or a new scripted installer method (supports Windows, Mac & Linux). Both of these methods today require direct access to an ESXi host for deployment, which may not work for everyone. What if you want to deploy the new VCSA 6.0 using an existing vCenter Server or running it on top of VMware Fusion or Workstation? Luckily, I spent quite a bit of time going through all these "alternative" deployment methods and documenting the process so that you have a choice on how you would like to test and evaluate vSphere 6 and the new VCSA in your environment.

These alternative methods will be using the VCSA OVA which is actually included in the VCSA ISO. You will need to extract the contents of the VCSA ISO and you can find the OVA in the following path after extraction: VMware-VCSA-all-6.0.0-2562643->vcsa->vmware-vcsa where vmware-vcsa is the VCSA OVA file. Depending on the deployment method you are using, you may only need to just extract the contents of the ISO or possibly rename the vmware-vcsa with .ova extension to deploy. Please refer to the articles below for more details.

Disclaimer: Though these alternative deployment options work, they are however not officially supported by VMware. Please use at your own risk.

In the upcoming days, I will be sharing a 4-part blog series for automating the deployment of the new VCSA 6.0 with the following deployment options:

In each article, I will provide resources on how to deploy to an existing vCenter Server or directly to an ESXi host using ovftool via a shell script as well using PowerCLI, deploying to VMware Fusion and deploying to VMware Workstation. Stay tune for Part 1 ...

Feedback needed for the future of VCSIM

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Last week, I had a chance to catchup with a couple of folks over in our Performance Engineering team to talk about VCSIM. For those of you who have not heard of VCSIM before or would like to know how to get started, I highly recommend you check out this article here and here for more details. We had a discussion on a variety of topics including how I and some of our customers are using VCSIM today.

As some of you already know, VCSIM is an internal tool originally developed by VMware Engineering for a very specific set of use cases, it was never intended to be used by our customers. Having said that, I think after talking to Engineering, they understood the value in having such a tool which could be useful to both our customers and partners. In fact, I have even shared a couple of use cases that I believe VCSIM can greatly benefit everyone:

  • Exploring and learning about the vSphere API and the basic inventory hierarchy of vSphere objects
  • Environment to develop and create various inventory reporting scripts (vCLI, PowerCLI, etc)
  • Developing performance metric gathering tools
  • Developing vSphere Web Client plugins and being able visualize large inventory of objects

There were some thoughts on how VCSIM could evolve over time from its current implementation as it was designed for a very specific purpose, but it was too early to tell and it would be based on some assumptions. Instead, I thought it might be useful to get feedback into Engineering so they could better understand how VCSIM was currently being used today. To help with this, I have created a very short survey below or you can also directly access it using the link here. Please take a few minutes to provide some feedback on how you currently use VCSIM today. Thanks in advance!

Additional VCSIM Resources: