VSAN – Page 29

Extending VSAN capabilities in the vSphere Web Client using vCO

05.29.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

One of my favorite features of vCenter Orchestrator is how easy it is to extend an existing vCO workflow and making it available directly in the vSphere Web Client. I think this is still not a very well known feature of vCO, but once you realize the capability of this feature, you will see how powerful it is to be able to provide context aware workflows in the vSphere Web Client. Another thing to be aware of is that vCO also provides full access to the underlying vSphere API, this means you can easily expose new functionality that may not exists in the vSphere Web Client.

A good example of this is a recent workflow that I created to extend some additional VSAN information directly in the vSphere Web Client. I wanted to be able to easily view the number of VSAN components for each of my ESXi hosts. Since this information is available through the vSphere API which I wrote about here, I was able to create a vCO Workflow which exposed this information and then make it available in the vSphere Web Client.

To get started, you will need to download the workflow and an updated vCenter vCO Plugin as it contains a fix for leveraging the VSAN APIs:

In the example below, I am using the vCO Appliance but the steps are very similar if you are using the Windows version.

Step 1 - Upload the o11nplugin-vsphere.dar.zip to your vCO Appliance

Step 2 - Unzip the contents by running the following command:

unzip o11nplugin-vsphere.dar.zip

Step 3 - Run the following command to set the appropriate ownership and permissions:

chmod 644 o11nplugin-vsphere.dar
chown vco:vco o11nplugin-vsphere.dar

Step 4 - Backup the original vCenter vCO Plugin by running the following command:

mv /usr/lib/vco/app-server/plugins/o11nplugin-vsphere.dar /usr/lib/vco/app-server/plugins/o11nplugin-vsphere.dar.bak

Step 5 - Copy the new plugin to the plugins directory by running the following command:

mv o11nplugin-vsphere.dar /usr/lib/vco/app-server/plugins

Step 6 - Restart the vCO Service to load the new plugin

/etc/init.d/vco-server restart

Once the vCO Server is available, you can login to the vCO Client and import the new VSAN workflow. To make the workflow available in the vSphere Web Client, you will need to login to the vSphere Web Client using an account that has access to the vCO Server and the instructions below.

Step 1 - Click on the vCO icon on the home page and then select Manage and Context Actions

Step 2 - Click on the green arrow to add a new worfklow

Step 3 - Browse for the VSAN workflow and then click on the Add button and associate the workflow with a vSphere Cluster object as seen in the screenshot below:

Once the context workflow has been added, you are now ready to run the new VSAN workflow! Right click on a VSAN enabled vSphere Cluster and under the All vCenter Orchestrator Actions, you should see our workflow:

Go ahead and run the workflow and once it completes, you can view the results by clicking on the workflow name in the Recent Tasks:

Under the Parameters section, we can see our input and output variables. In this workflow, I have created a String output called "count" which contains the name of each ESXi host in the VSAN Cluster along with the number of corresponding components.

As you can see, you can easily enhance the functionality of the vSphere Web Client by simply extending it with either out of the box or custom vCO Workflows that you have created. Happy workflowing!

How to run the VSAN Observer in "collection" mode in the background?

05.18.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

The VSAN Observer is a very powerful tool that allows you to get in-depth performance analysis of your VSAN environment. One of the really useful feature is the ability to run the VSAN Observer in "collection" mode by using the --generate-html-bundle option. Something that I have noticed when running the VSAN Observer in collection mode is that you not close the current SSH session, else the collection will stop. I have even tried running the VSAN Observer using RVC's not very well known "script" feature and then back-grounding the process, but after a minute or so the collection also just stops.

The only workaround that I have found is by using Screen, a full-screen windows session manager usually found on most Linux/UNIX and Mac OS X systems. Having used Screen in the past life as a Systems Administrator, I can say it is an extremely useful tool when needing to perform long running tasks and not have to worry about your SSH session being disconnected. You can start a session, disconnect and then re-connect at a later time to monitor the progress.

If you are on a Mac, then Screen should have already been installed. Below are the steps to run the VSAN Observer in the VCSA using Screen:

Step 1 - Start screen and give the session a name such as "VSAN-Observer" for example:

screen -S VSAN-Observer

Step 2 - SSH to your VCSA and login to RVC and start the VSAN Observer using the collection mode as you normally would. For step by step instructions, check out Rawlinson Rivera's article here on setting up the VSAN Observer.

Step 3 - Once the VSAN Observer is running, enter the following key combinations which will detach your Screen session:

Crtl+a d

Step 4 - To list the available Screen sessions, you can run the following command:

screen -list

Step 5 - To re-attach to your Screen session, you will need to specify the session name. In our example, it was called VSAN-Observer:

screen -r VSAN-Observer

An alternative to Step 2, instead of running the VSAN Observer interactively, I actually prefer to run the VSAN Observer using RVC's script option. It is just less typing for me and makes it easy to collect stats across multiple VSAN environments

To do so, you will need to create a script file that contains the following:

# William Lam
# www.virtuallyghetto.com
# RVC script for running VSAN Observer

datacenter_name = "VSAN-Datacenter"
cluster_name = "VSAN-Cluster"
vsan_html_output_directory = "/storage/core"
vsan_observer_runtime = "1"

# Do not edit beyond here #

puts "Enabling VSAN Observer collection for: #{cluster_name} ..."
rvc_exec("vsan.observer --run-webserver --force --generate-html-bundle #{vsan_html_output_directory} --max-runtime #{vsan_observer_runtime} /localhost/#{datacenter_name}/computers/#{cluster_name}")

The RVC script option actually accepts a Ruby script to execute and if we take a look at the script, we are just passing some arguments to the vsan.observer command.

To use the RVC script instead of interactively logging in, you can run the following command:

rvc -s [SCRIPT-NAME] [USERNAME:PASSWORD]@localhost

I think a nice feature enhancement to the VSAN Observer is the ability to automatically background the collection process without having to rely on the existing SSH connection, perhaps this is something Christian may consider for a future update to RVC 🙂 In the meantime, this is a pretty decent work around

How to run Nested ESXi on the vCloud Hybrid Service?

05.02.2014 by William Lam // 7 Comments

Today I was granted access to VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service and the first order of business for me of course, was to provision a Nested ESXi VM! After going through the vCHS UI (which is very slick and easy to use by the way) and the vCloud Director UI, I realized the ESXi guestOS type has not been enabled on the backend of the vCloud Director Database. This totally makes sense, as vCHS is a production ready service and they definitely would not want to run anything that is not officially supported.

Having said that, I can see the benefits to customers who would like build out a Nested ESXi environment on vCHS for lab purposes instead of having to manage their own. Some customers even leverage Nested ESXi as part of their development and testing of software and it can be challenging at times to quickly spin up a brand new environment. Instead, they go to vCHS and with just a couple of of clicks in the UI or automatically using the vCloud APIs, provision a couple of Nested ESXi instances for testing. You can easily discard the resources once you are done or keep them running a bit longer.

Having worked with vCloud Director in the past, I knew that you could import an OVF/OVA and I thought maybe I could just import the Nested ESXi OVF templates that I built and potentially workaround vCHS "limitation" 🙂

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware nor is it supported on vCHS

I tried to upload one of the OVF templates that I built, but it turns out vCloud Director does not supported the Dynamic Disks feature, so I had to perform two additional steps.

Step 1 - Download one of the following Nested ESXi OVF templates

Step 2 - Import the OVF template in an existing vSphere environment and ensure you are doing so using the vSphere Web Client, as some of the properties may not be imported properly

Step 3 - Once deployed, go ahead and re-export the image to an OVF/OVA (I choose OVA as it is a single file) and this will generate the empty VMDKs for you so the image should still be very small (< 1MB)

Step 4 - Login into to your vCHS account and click on your Virtual Datacenter. Select Virtual Machines and then click on Manage in vCloud Director. Import the OVF/OVA that you have just exported

Step 5 - Once the import has been completed, you now have a Virtual Machine that has been configured with the correct guestOS type which should be VMware ESXi 5.x as seen in the screenshot below

Step 6 - At this point, you can either mount an ESXi ISO over your browser or upload it into the vCloud Director Catalog so you can mount it locally and begin your installation of ESXi. Below is a screenshot of 3 Nested ESXi VMs running on vCHS

Note: It looks like some of the advanced VM settings that are part of my OVF template are ignored as part of the vCloud Director import. This means that if you would like to run a Nested VSAN environment on vCHS, you will not be able to rely on the SSD emulation setting but instead, you will need to run through the ESXCLI claim rules to mark particular disks as "SSD" devices. It would have been really nice if vCloud Director would preserve all the advanced VM settings but at least you can still run a Nested VSAN environment.

So there you have it, Nested ESXi running on vCHS! I am kind of curious if this is the first instance of a Nested ESXi VM running on vCHS without having admin access on the backend system?

Note: One limitation to be aware of is that since the backend of vCloud Director is not properly enabled for Nested Virtualization support, this means you will NOT be able to run Nested VMs on top of the Nested ESXi instances. This is due to the lack of having Network Pool which has both Promiscuous & Forge Transmits enabled which is a requirement for proper Nested VMs connectivity. I wonder if vCHS should provide Nested Virtualization capabilities? I know I definitely would like to see it, what do you think? Leave a comment if you have some thoughts on this topic.

UPDATE (05/4/14) - If you wish to run a Nested VSAN environment on vCHS, you will need to take a look at this blog post here on how to "fake" an SSD on one of the devices by using ESXCLI claim rules. The rason for this is that you will not be able to leverage the other method of emulating an SSD device via advanced setting as that requires access to the underlying vSphere environment which you will not have in vCHS.