Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Management & Automation

How to simplify vSAN Support!

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Last week I presented at the Tech Support Summit in Cork with Cormac. Our session was about the evolution of vSAN, where are we today but more importantly which directly will we be going. One thing that struck me when I discussed vSAN Support Insight, the solution we announced not to long ago, is that not too many people seemed to understand the benefit. When you have vSAN and you enable CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program) then you have a phone home solution for your vSphere and vSAN environment automatically. What this brings is fairly simple to explain: less frustration! Why? Well the support team will have, when you provide them your vCenter UUID, instant access to all of the metadata of your environment. What does that mean? Well the configuration for instance, the performance data, logs, health check details etc. This will allow them to instantly get a good understanding of what your environment looks like, without the need for you as a customer to upload your logs etc.

At the event I demoed the Support Insight interface, which is what the Support Team has available, and a lot of customers afterwards said: now I see the benefit of enabling this, I will do this for sure when I get back to the office. So I figured I would take the demo, do a voice over and release it to the public. We need more people to join the customer experience improvement program, so watch the video to see what this gives the support team. Note by the way that everything is anonymized, without you providing a UUID it is not possible to correlate the data to a customer. Even when you provide a UUID the support team can only see the host, vm, policy and portgroup (etc) names when you provide them with what is called an obfuscation map (key). Anyway, watch the demo and join now!

vSphere 6.7 announced!

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It is that time of the year again, a new vSphere release announcement! (For those interested in what’s new for vSAN make sure to read my other post.) vSphere 6.7, what’s in a name / release? Well a bunch of stuff, and I am not going to address all of the new functionality as the list would simply be too long. So this list features what I think is worth mentioning and discussing.

  • vSphere Client (HTML-5) is about 95% feature complete
  • Improved vCenter Appliance monitoring
  • Improved vCenter Backup Management
  • ESXi Single Reboot Upgrades
  • ESXi Quick Boot
  • 4K Native Drive Support
  • Max Virtual Disks increase from 60 to 256
  • Max ESXi number of Devices from 512 to 1024
  • Max ESXi paths to Devices from 2048 to 4096
  • Support for RDMA
  • vSphere Persistent Memory
  • DRS initial placement improvements

Note that there’s a whole bunch of stuff missing from this list, for instance there were many security enhancements, but I don’t see the point of me pretending to be an expert on that topic, while I know some of the top experts will have a blog out soon.

Not sure what I should tell about the vSphere Client (h5) at this point. Everyone has been waiting for this, and everyone has been waiting for it to reach ~90/95% feature complete. And we are there. I have been using it extensively for the past 12 months and I am very happy with how it turned out. I think the majority of you will be very very happy with what you will see and with the overall experience. It just feels fast(er) and seems more intuitive.

When it comes to management and monitoring of the vCenter Appliance (https://ip of vcenter:5480) there are a whole bunch of improvements. For me personally the changes in the monitoring tab are very useful and also the services tab is useful. Now you can immediately see when a particular disk is running out of space, as shown in the screenshot below. And you can for instance restart a particular service in the “Services” tab.

Next is vCenter Backup Management, a lot of people have been asking for this. We introduced Backup and Recovery of the appliance a while ago, very useful, but unfortunately it didn’t provide a scheduling mechanism. Sure you could create a script that would do this for you on a regular cadence, but not everyone wants to bother with that. Now in the Appliance Management UI you can simply create a schedule for backup. This is one of those small enhancements, which to me is a big deal! I’m sure that Emad or Adam will have a blog out soon on the topic of vCenter enhancements, so make sure to follow their blogs.

Another big deal is the fact that we shaved off a reboot for major upgrades. As of 6.7 you now only have 1 reboot with ESXi. Again, a tiny thing going from 2 back to 1, but when you have servers taking 10-15 minutes to go through the reboot process and you have dozens to of servers to reboot it makes Single Reboot ESXi Upgrades a big thing. For those on 6.5 right now, you will be able to enjoy the single reboot experience when upgrading to 6.7!

One feature I have personally been waiting for is ESXi Quick Boot. I saw a demo of this last year at our internal R&D conference at VMware and I was impressed. I don’t think many people at that stage saw the importance of the feature, but I am glad it made it in to the release. So what is it? Well basically it is a way to restart the hypervisor without going through the physical hardware reboot process. This means that you are now removing that last reboot, of course this only applies when your used server hardware supports it. Note that with the first release only a limited set of servers will support it, nevertheless this is a big thing. Not just for reboots, but also for upgrades / updates. A second ESXi memory image can be created and updated and when rebooting simply switched over to the latest and greatest instead of doing a full reboot. It will save, again, a lot time. I looked at a pre-GA build and noticed the following platforms are supported, this should be a good indication:

Of course you can also see if the host is supported in the vSphere Client, I found it in the Web Client but not in the H5 Client, maybe I am overlooking it, that could of course be the case.

Then up next are a bunch of core storage enhancements. First 4K Native Drive Support, very useful for those who want to use the large capacity devices. Not much else to say about it other than that it will also be supported by vSAN. I do hope that those using it for vSAN do take the potential performance impact in to account. (High capacity, Low IOPS >> low iops per GB!) Up next is the increase of a bunch of “max values“. Number of virtual disks going from 60 to 256 virtual disks for PVSCSI. And on top of that the number of Paths and Devices is also going up. Number of devices doubled from 512 to 1024 per host, and so has the number of paths as it is going from 2048 to 4096. Some of our largest customers will definitely appreciate that!

Then there’s also the support for RDMA, which is great for applications requiring extremely low latency and very high bandwidth! Note that when RDMA is used most of the ESXi Network stack is skipped, and when used in pass-through mode this also means that vMotion is not available. So that will only be useful for scale-out applications which have their own load balancing and high availability functionality. For those who can tolerate a bit more latency a paravirtualized RDMA adaptor will be available, you will need HW version 13 for this though.​

vSphere Persistent Memory is something that I was definitely excited about. Although there aren’t too many supported server configurations, or even persistent memory solutions, it is something that introduces new possibilities. Why? Well this will provide you performance much higher than SSD at a cost which is lower than DRAM. Think less than 1 microsecond of latency. Where nanoseconds is for DRAM and Flash typically is low milliseconds under load. I have mentioned this in a couple of my sessions so far, NVDIMM will be big, which is the name commonly used for Persistent Memory. For those planning on buying persistent memory, do note that your operating system also needs to understand how to use it. There is a Virtual NVDIMM device in vSphere 6.7 and if the Guest OS has support for it then it will be able to use this byte addressable device. I believe a more extensive blog about vSphere Persistent Memory and some of the constraints will appear on the Virtual Blocks blog soon, so keep an eye on that as well. Cormac already has his fav new 6.7 features up on his blog, make sure to read that as well.

And last but not least, there was a significant improvement done in the initial placement process for DRS. Some of this logic was already included in 6.5, but only worked when HA was disabled. As of 6.7 it is also available when HA is enabled, making it much more likely that you will be able to benefit from the 3x decrease in time that it takes for the initial placement process to complete. A big big enhancements in the DRS space. I am sure though that Frank Denneman will have more to say about this.

22 / 23 May 2018 – VMware Technical Support Summit

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A while back I was asked if I could present at the VMware Technical Support Summit and last week I received the agenda. I forgot to blog about it so I figured I would share it with everyone. I was supposed to go to this event last year but I had a clash in my calendar unfortunately. At this event organized by our support team you will have the ability to sit in some extreme deep dive sessions. Below you can find the agenda, and also here’s the registration link if you are interested! Note that Joe Baguley will be doing a keynote, and Cormac Hogan and I will be doing a session on vSAN futures!

Startup update: Runecast

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A while ago I introduced Runecast on my blog. I have known these guys for a while and this week I had to pleasure to be briefed on their new release: Runecast 1.7. The big ticket item in this release for sure it the vSAN Support. You may ask yourself why you would need Runecast when you have things like the health check and the “online” health check, well it seems that Runecast’s implementation covers more detail. Anyway, what is Runecast? As a company they refer to themselves as the knowledge automation experts, and I think that is a fair statement.

Runecast has developed an appliance which can be connected to one or multiple vCenter Server instances. After linking these you can “scan” the environment and Runecast will tell you about the risks. Not just from a security perspective, but it will also assess logs, configuration and even best practices. Your whole environment will be assessed in a report will be provided in a simple HTML-5 interface, or in the Web Client or the vSphere H5 client even. I said “simple”, but the information provided and the detail is far from simple… When I say simple I refer to their user interface. It is slick, and very easy to use.

Since I discussed Runecast last they added some additional features, like for instance a VRO plugin, full rest API, improved log search, Web Client and H5 client plugins but more importantly for many government agencies: DISA STIG compliancy checks. Yes, Runecast can check your environment against DISA STIG and report on any potential issues. Nice right?

This new release, version 1.7, now brings vSAN support. It also includes a new dashboard widget, which provides faster insights in how your environment is behaving. For vSAN in particular they didn’t only include KB article checks, but also implemented all best practices from the Design and Sizing guide, Network Design guide and the Stretched Cluster white paper. And they even hinted about adding best practices which are listed in the Essential vSAN book Cormac and I wrote, how cool is that? What is also nice is that their appliance is supported with vSAN 5.x and 6.x, and requires no direct access to the internet. You can simply download the appliance and install, and then update with the latest dataset by downloading an ISO.

Oh and before I forget, of course they also provide all the guidance and info needed around Spectre/Meltdown. Where normally their trial is limited, they actually do provide ALL info needed for Spectre/Meltdown as they realized that this is very valuable to customers and felt they could not hold this back.

For the Runecast blog on the 1.7 release go here.

Don’t know why DRS is not balancing your cluster? DRS Dump Insight!

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I was just reading up and noticed the DRS Dump Insight solution. It is a SaaS based DRS Dump Analyzer which gives you details around why your cluster is not balanced, or why certain recommendations are not made. Especially the “what if” scenarios are cool if you ask me. You can take a dump and then using the whatif feature check out what would happen to your cluster if for instance all affinity rules were dropped. Or what would happen if the DRS migration threshold is changed, or some advanced settings are used.

You can find some more info about it here, and the SaaS tool here. I hope this will make it in to the product soon in the form of a “health check”… Very useful and insightful! Oh, if you can’t access the website, try it in “Incognito Mode”. Seems there are some issues with the certificate.