Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcg

Single socket vSAN ready node AMD EPYC Rome on the VCG!

· · 3 Comments

Yesterday I tweeted something and I want to reiterate it to make sure that those who are just following the blog, and not my twitter account, also are aware. On the vSAN Compatibility Guide (VCG) there were already a number of single-socket servers, but most of these were limited in terms of CPU/MEM resources. Last week two new servers were added to the VCG. These servers are based on the AMD EPYC Rome CPUs and can have up to 64 cores. Yes, 64 cores per CPU. They can go up to 2TB worth of memory, depending on the DIMMS used, also while on the topic of memory, the NUMA implementation completely changed with AMD EPYC Rome, but I am sure Frank Denneman will have something to say about that soon. Why would I bring these servers up? Well, for those looking to do 2-node vSAN configurations or smaller vSAN clusters, they could be a great alternative solution! Heck, I would consider them in general I think.

Check your VSAN disk controllers against the HCL with PowerCLI

· ·

Every now and then customers ask if it is possible to check if disk controllers are on the VSAN HCL (Or VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) as it is actually called these days) for a given set of hosts through PowerCLI. Alan Renouf figured he would knock something out, thanks Alan for sharing! (Next up would be validate drivers and firmware of all components, thanks!) What this script does is the following, note that you need internet access for this to work:

  • Connect to vCenter
  • Download latest VSAN HCL details (json file)
  • Compare controllers of each host against the VSAN HCL
  • Report the state of your infra

Here is the script, it can also be found in the VMware Developer Center repository by the way.

Connect-VIServer myvcenter -user Administrator -password MyPass23
 
 
Function Get-CompatibleVSANController {
    if (-Not $vSANHCL) {
        $vSANHCL = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri http://partnerweb.vmware.com/service/vsan/all.json | ConvertFrom-Json
    }
    $vSANHCL.data.controller
}
 
$HBAs = get-vmhost | Get-VMHostPciDevice | where { $_.DeviceClass -eq "MassStorageController" }
 
Foreach ($HBA in $HBAs) {
    $HBAFound = $false
    Write-Host "Looking for $($hba.name) from host $($HBA.VMhost)"
    Foreach ($entry in Get-CompatibleVSANController) {
        $vid = [String]::Format("{0:x}", $HBA.VendorId)
              $did = [String]::Format("{0:x}", $HBA.DeviceId)
              $svid = [String]::Format("{0:x}", $HBA.SubVendorId)
        $ssid = [String]::Format("{0:x}", $HBA.SubDeviceId)
        If (($vid -eq $entry.vid) -and ($did -eq $entry.did) -and ($svid -eq $entry.svid) -and ($ssid -eq $entry.ssid) ) {
            Write-Host " HBA in $($HBA.VMHost) is $($HBA.Name) which can be found in the HCL as $($Entry.vendor) - $($Entry.Model) at the following URL: `n $($entry.vcglink)" -ForegroundColor Green
            $HBAFound = $true
        }
    }
    If (-Not $HBAFound){
        Write-Host " $($HBA.Name) in $($HBA.VMHost) is not found!" -ForegroundColor Red
    }
}

If you run it the output will look like this: