Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

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New fling: DRS Lens

A cool new fling was just released: DRS Lens. As stated on the flings website:

DRS Lens provides a simple, yet powerful interface to highlight the value proposition of vSphere DRS. Providing answers to simple questions about DRS will help quell many of the common concerns that users may have. DRS Lens provides different dashboards in the form of tabs for each cluster being monitored.

It tracks things like VM Happiness, balance of the cluster itself, User and System initiated vMotions etc. It truly allow you to dig in to your cluster and it could be very useful during cross cluster rebalancing, or trying to figure out where an imbalance is coming from by correlating different vCenter tasks/events to resource contention / VM unhappiness situations. I hope to see this info in the HTML-5 UI at some point! If you are interested, download the fling, give it a try and provide feedback through the comments, the developers will read those and follow up! https://labs.vmware.com/flings/drs-lens

 

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VMkernel Observations (VOBs)

I never really looked at VOBs but as this came up last week during a customer meeting I decided to look in to it a bit. I hadn’t realized there was such a large number of them in the first place. My conversation was in the context of vSAN, but there are many different VOBs. For those who don’t know VOBs are system events. These events are logged and you can create different alarms for when they are being logged.

You can check the full list of VOBs on ESXi, SSH in to it and then look at this file:

  • /usr/lib/vmware/hostd/extensions/hostdiag/locale/en/event.vmsg

When they are triggered you will see them here:

  •  /var/log/vobd.log

And as stated when you want to do something with them you can create a customer alarm. Select “specific event occuring on this object” and click next:

Now you add an event, simply click the “+” and remove the current value and simply copy/paste the VOB string in, the string will look something like this: “esx.problem.vob.vsan.pdl.offline”. Hit enter when you added it and then click “Next” and “Finish”.

I find the following useful myself:

  • esx.problem.vsan.net.redundancy.reduced
  • esx.problem.vob.vsan.lsom.componentthreshold
  • esx.problem.vob.vsan.lsom.diskerror
  • esx.problem.vob.vsan.pdl.offline
  • esx.problem.vsan.lsom.congestionthreshold
  • esx.problem.vob.vsan.dom.nospaceduringresync

There are many more, and I just listed those I found useful for vSAN, for more detail check the following links: