One neat capability that was introduced with vSAN 6.6 is the ability to "silence" and disable specific vSAN Health Checks. A recent use for this came up on Duncan's blog where the vMotion health check would fail if you are using a vMotion network stack. As you can imagine, this feature can also come in handy for vSphere Home Labs where your hardware may not be on the official VMware HCL and wish to disable those specific vSAN Health Checks.
Getting started w/the new PowerCLI 6.5.1 Get-VsanView cmdlet
One of the things that I am most excited about from an Automation standpoint with the vSAN 6.6 release is that customers using PowerCLI will now have complete access to the vSAN Management API which we had initially introduced back in vSphere 6.0 Update 2. In PowerCLI 6.5R1, customers only had access to high level vSAN cmdlets which did a pretty good job covering the broad set of vSAN functionality. However, it did not expose the complete vSAN Management API and this has been something many customers have been asking about.
With the new PowerCLI 6.5.1 release, a new Get-VsanView cmdlet is now available that will exposes the complete vSAN Management API using PowerCLI. Since the vSAN Management API has been around since vSphere 6.0 Update 2, you will also be able to use this new cmdlet against a vSAN 6.2, vSAN 6.5 and vSAN 6.6 environment! You simply just need to update your PowerCLI installation which you should always do to get the latest fixes and enhancements.
When you connect to either a vCenter Server and/or ESXi host, you will be able to view all available vSAN Managed Objects for the system by simply running the cmdlet without any arguments as shown in the screenshot below.
If you wish to access a specific vSAN Managed Object type, then you will need to pass in the vSAN MoRef ID from the given list. Here is an example of accessing the "VsanVcClusterHealthSystem-vsan-cluster-health-system" which will give us access to the VsanVcClusterHealthSystem.
SMART drive data now available using vSAN Management 6.6 API
One of the major storage enhancements that was introduced in vSphere 5.1 as part of the new I/O Device Management (IODM) framework was the addition of SMART (Self Monitoring, Analysis And Reporting Technology) data for monitoring FC, FCoE, iSCSI, SAS protocol statistics, this is especially useful for monitoring the health of an SSD device. Historically, there was not a public vSphere API to consume this information and customers had to rely on ESXCLI which is not very friendly from a programmatic standpoint.
One of the nice enhancements that was introduced in vSAN 6.6 from an API standpoint is that you can now access SMART data using the vSAN Management 6.6 API. The other really cool thing about this enhancement is that although this API was added under the vSAN Management API, you do not actually have to be using vSAN to be able to use this new API!
There are two methods in which you can access the SMART data:
- vCenter Server - When connecting to a vCenter Server, you can access the VsanQueryVcClusterSmartStatsSummary() method which is available as part of the VsanVcClusterHealthSystem and you simply just provide it the name of a vSphere Cluster.
- ESXi Host - When connecting directly to an ESXi host, you can access the VsanHostQuerySmartStats() method which is available as part of the HostVsanHealthSystem.
To demonstrate how these two new APIs work, I have create two sample scripts: vsan-smarts-data-sample.py using vSAN Management SDK for Python and VSANSmartsData.ps1 using the new PowerCLI Get-VsanView cmdlet.
Here is an example of running the python sample:
python vsan-smarts-data-sample.py -s 192.168.1.200 -u '*protected email*' -p 'VMware1!' -c VSAN-Cluster
Here is an example of running the PowerCLI sample:
Get-VSANSmartsData -Cluster VSAN-Cluster
