vpxd_servicecfg

Increasing disk capacity simplified with VCSA 6.0 using LVM autogrow

02.10.2015 by William Lam // 20 Comments

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"

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

Step 4 - Confirm the newly added capacity has been consumed

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.

Completely automating vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 5.5 Configurations

01.15.2015 by William Lam // 8 Comments

As promised, here is a new script called configureVCSA55.sh that I have put together after learning about a couple new VCSA automation tips here and here. This script will fully automate the configuration of a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 5.5 and once the script has completed, you will have a fully functional vCenter Server Appliance. There are several variables at the top of the script that you will want to edit prior to running the script.

Here is a summary of the high level operations the script is performing and not all operations will be performed, it will depend on the variables that you have configured.

Accept EULA
vSphere Inventory Size Configuration
Active Directory Configuration (optional)
DNS Search Domain Configuration
NTP Configuration
vCenter Server Database Configuration
vSphere SSO Configuration
vSphere SSO Identity Source Configuration for Active Directory (optional)
Active Directory default Identity Source Configuration (optional)
VMware Telemtry Configuration (optional)

To run the script, you can either SCP the script to a newly deployed VCSA and run it locally in the shell or remotely via SSH using the following command:

ssh root@[VC-IP] < configureVCSA55.sh

I almost never go through a manual configuration of the VCSA anymore (since 5.0) as it just takes way too long! Hopefully you will find this script handy when needing to quickly test something or automating the deployment of a few dozen VCSA which I know of a few customers that are doing on a regular basis 🙂

Quick Tip - Automate JVM Heap configurations after increasing VCSA memory

01.12.2015 by William Lam // 1 Comment

If you are using the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) and you wish to increase the VM memory settings to one of the three supported memory configurations: 8-16GB, 24GB & 32GB, there is on additional configuration change before the new memory configuration can take effect. This change is adjusting the JVM Heap memory settings for the following vCenter Server Services: vSphere Web Client, Inventory Service and SPS (vSphere Profile-Driven Storage). If you would like to do this from the UI, you can access the VCSA's VAMI interface and under vCenter Server->Services tab, there is a "Inventory Size" toggle that you will need to set based on your VCSA's configured memory. Once you have save the settings, you will need to restart the vCenter Server for the changes to take effect.

Note: The text in the VAMI states that the appliance requires at least 16GB of RAM for a Medium configuration which is actually incorrect, it should actually say 24GB for Medium configuration. The correct supported VCSA memory configuration maximum can be found here.

The UI is great but what if you wish to automate this change? This is especially handy if you have already automated the memory increase for the VCSA itself. Luckily, we can turn to our handy vpxd_servicefg command which supports modifying the JVM Memory based on the three supported vSphere Inventory Sizes. Below is the chart with the respective Inventory Size and command to issue within the VCSA. The parameters reflect the JVM Heap configurations for the vSphere Web Client, Inventory Service and SPS (vSphere Profile-Driven Storage).

Inventory Size	VCSA Memory	Command
Small	8-16GB	/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg 'jvm-max-heap' 'write' '512' '3072' '1024'
Medium	24GB	/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg 'jvm-max-heap' 'write' '512' '6144' '2048'
Large	32GB	/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg 'jvm-max-heap' 'write' '1024' '12288' '4096'

Once the command has successfully completed, you can refresh the VCSA VAMI interface and you should see the appropriate size has been configured. For the changes to take effect, you will need to restart the vCenter Service by issuing one of the following commands:

/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg service restart

/etc/init.d/vmware-vpxd restart