VSAN 6.1

Docker Container for the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC)

11.08.2015 by William Lam // 2 Comments

The Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) is an extremely useful tool for vSphere Administrators and has been bundled as part of vCenter Server (Windows and the vCenter Server Appliance) since vSphere 6.0. One feature that is only available in the VCSA's version of RVC is the VSAN Observer which is used to capture and analyze performance statistics for a VSAN environment for troubleshooting purposes.

For customers who are still using the Windows version of vCenter Server and wish to leverage this tool, it is generally recommended that you deploy a standalone VCSA just for the VSAN Observer capability which does not require any additional licensing. Although it only takes 10 minutes or so to setup, having to download and deploy a full blown VCSA to just use the VSAN Observer is definitely not ideal, especially if you are resource constrained in your environment. You also may only need the VSAN Observer for a short amount of time, but it could take you longer to deploy and in a troubleshooting situation, time is of the essence.

I recently came across an internal Socialcast thread and one of the suggestion was why not build a tiny Photon OS VM that already contained RVC? Instead of building a specific Photon OS that was specific to RVC, why not just create a Docker Container for RVC? This also means you could pull down the Docker Container from Photon OS or any other system that has Docker installed. In fact, I had already built a Docker Container for some handy VMware Utilities, it would be simple enough to just have an RVC Docker Container.

The one challenge that I had was that the current RVC github repo does not contain the latest vSphere 6.x changes. The fix was simple, I just copied the latest RVC files from a vSphere 6.0 Update 1 deployment of the VCSA (/opt/vmware/rvc and /usr/bin/rvc) and used that to build my RVC Docker Container which is now hosted on Docker Hub here and includes the Dockerfile in case someone was interested in how I built it.

To use the RVC Docker Container, you just need access to a Linux Container Host, for example VMware Photon OS which can be deployed using an ISO or OVA. For instructions on setting that up, please take a look here which should only take a minute or so. Once logged in, you just need to run the following commands to pull down the RVC Docker Container and to star the container:

docker pull lamw/rvc
docker run --rm -it lamw/rvc

As seen in the screenshot above, once the Docker Container has started, you can then access RVC like you normally would. Below is an quick example of logging into one of my VSAN environments and using RVC to run the VSAN Health Check command.

If you wish to run the VSAN Observer with the live web server, you will need to map the port from the Linux Container Host to the VSAN Observer port which runs on 8010 by default when starting the RVC Docker Container. To keep things simple, I would recommend mapping 80->8010 and you would run the following command:

docker run --rm -it -p 80:8010 lamw/rvc

Once the RVC Docker Container has started, you can then start the VSAN Observer with --run-webserver option and if you connect to the IP Address of your Linux Container Host using a browser, you should see the VSAN Observer Stats UI.

Hopefully this will come in handy for anyone who needs to quickly access RVC.

Automating full configuration of a VSAN Stretched Cluster using RVC

10.23.2015 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

A couple of weeks back I had spent some time setting up several VSAN Stretched Clusters in my lab for some testing and although it was extremely easy to setup using the vSphere Web Client, I still prefer to stand up the environment completely automated 🙂

In looking to automate the VSAN Stretched Cluster configuration, I was interested in something that would pretty much work out of the box and not require any additional download or setup. The obvious answer would be to use the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) is a really awesome tool that is available as part of vCenter Server included in both Windows vCenter Server and the VCSA.

For those of you who have not used RVC before, I highly recommend you give it a try and you can take a look at this article to see some of the cool features and benefits. I am making use of the RVC script option which I have written about in the past here to perform the VSAN Stretched Configuration. One of the new RVC namespaces that have been introduced in vSphere 6.0 Update 1 is the vsan.stretchedcluster.* commands and the one we are specifically interested in is the vsan.stretchedcluster.config_witness command.

There are a couple of things the script expects from an environment setup, so I will just spend a few minutes covering the pre-reqs and the assumptions before diving into the script. I will assume you already have a vCenter Server deployed and configured with an empty inventory. I also assume you have already deployed at least two ESXi hosts and a VSAN Witness VM that meets all the VSAN pre-reqs like at least one VSAN enabled VMkernel interface and associated disk requirements. Below is a screenshot of the vSphere Web Client of the initial environment.

Next, we will need to download the RVC script deploy_stretch_cluster.rb and upload that to your vCenter Server. Before you can execute the script, you will need to edit the script and adjust the variable names based on your environment. Once you have saved the changes, you can then run the RVC script by running the following command:

rvc -s deploy_stretch_cluster.rb [VC-USERNAME]@localhost

Here is a screenshot of running the script on the VCSA using Nested ESXi VMs + VSAN Witness VM for the Stretched Clustering configuration:

If everything executed successfully, you should see a "Task result: success" which signifies that the VSAN Witness VM was successfully added to the VSAN Stretched Cluster. If we now refresh the vSphere Web Client and under the Fault Domains configurations in the VSAN Cluster, we now see both our 2-Node VSAN Cluster and the VSAN Witness VM.

Hopefully this script can also benefit others who are interested in quickly standing up a VSAN Stretched Cluster, especially for evaluation or testing purposes. Enjoy getting your VSAN on!

Erasing existing disk partitions now available in the vSphere Web Client (vSphere 6.0 Update 1)

09.29.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

One of the primary challenges when trying re-purpose existing storage devices is ensuring that all data and existing partitions have been completely removed. Often times, customers end up resorting to third-party tools like GParted which requires you to boot your server into the LiveCD before you can remove the existing partitions. This is less than ideal, especially if you need to perform this operation across multiple systems.

For customers who wish to re-purpose their existing storage devices for other use, including VSAN, there is now a new UI option in the vSphere Web Client introduced in vSphere 6.0 Update 1 to help assist with this procedure. I had not seen anyone talk about this feature yet and figure I would share some details as this is something I have heard customers ask for in the past. You can find this new option (icon with disk and eraser) by clicking onto a specific ESXi host and then selecting the Manage->Storage Adapters and then highlighting the specific storage device you wish to erase as seen in the screenshot below.

Once the erase partition icon or action is selected, you will then be presented with a summary of the existing partitions on the disk and then prompted to confirm that you wish to delete ALL partitions on the disk.

After the operation has successfully completed, you can now re-purpose the storage device for other use like VSAN!

For those of you who are interested from an Automation standpoint, this UI operation actually makes use of an existing vSphere API that has been for quite some time called updateDiskPartitions() under the StorageSystem manager of an ESXi host. To erase all partitions, you simply pass in an empty spec to the API method.

In addition, I also want to quickly mention that you will also have the ability to edit and erase existing disk partitions using the ESXi Embedded Host Client Fling which will be available in a future update. Below is a quick screenshot on what that would look like.