Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Booting ESXi from SD/USB devices? Time to reconsider when buying new hardware!

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We’ve all seen those posts from people about worn-out SD/USB devices, or maybe even experience it ourselves at some point in time. Most of you reading this probably also knew there was an issue with 7.0 U2, which resulted in USB/SD devices wearing out a lot quicker. Those issues have been resolved with the latest patch for 7.0 U2. It has, however, resulted in a longer debate around whether SD/USB devices should still be used for booting ESXi, and it seems that the jury has reached a verdict.

On the 16th of September, a KB article was published by VMware, which contains statements around the future of SD/USB devices. I can be short about it, if you are buying new hardware make sure to have a proper persistent storage device, USB/SD is not the right choice going forward! Why? The volume of reads/writes to and from the OS-DATA partition continues to increase with every release, which means that the lower grade devices will simply wear out faster. Now, I am not going to repeat word for word what is mentioned in the KB, I would just like to urge everyone to read the KB article, and make sure to plan accordingly! Personally, I am a fan of M.2 flash devices for booting. They are not too expensive(greenfield deployments), plus they can provide enterprise-grade persistent storage to store all your ESXi related data. Make sure to follow the requirements around endurance though!

Command-line upgrade of vCenter fails with Test transaction failed to update packages error

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I have various test environments, and one of my environments I was testing the command-line upgrade of vCenter Server. Now, most of my environments we tend to use for destructive testing and strange update/upgrade scenarios, so we hit some strange issues every now and then. While I was doing the command-line based upgrade of vCenter Server (see this post for how to do that), I hit an error. The error was the following:

Test transaction failed to update packages

I looked at the log called “/var/log/vmware/applmgmt/software-packages.log”, and I noticed the following entry:

eventlog is obsoleted by (installed) syslog-ng-3.17.2-1.ph3.x86_64

I removed the package manually as follows:

rpm -e syslog-ng-3.17.2-1.ph3.x86_64

I then retried the update and it worked, as shown in the screenshot below!

Updating VCSA and hitting the error Test RPM transaction failed

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I was updating my environment to vCenter Server 7.0 U2c, while going through the process I got this error that says “Test RPM transaction failed”. Below is the screenshot of the error. if you click “resume” you then, unfortunately, get stuck in an infinite loop. The only way to get out of the loop is by removing a file via SSH on vCSA called “/etc/applmgmt/appliance/software_update_state.conf”.

So now what if you want to update? We resolved it as follows, and let me include the deletion of the state file as well:

rm /etc/applmgmt/appliance/software_update_state.conf

Then we rebooted the VCSA:

reboot

Then we went into the appliance shell via SSH and ran the installer from the appliance:

appliancesh
software-packages install --url --acceptEulas

After which the installation was completed correctly.

vSAN Storage Rules policy capability allows to set dedupe per VM?

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There was a question posted on the VMware Community Forums, and as this is something I have been asked regularly, I figured I would do a quick blog post about it. Although I have covered this before, it doesn’t hurt to repeat, as it appears to be somewhat confusing for people. When you create a VM Storage Policy, starting with vSAN 7.0 U2 you have the ability to specify if a VM needs to be Encrypted, have Dedupe and Compression enabled, have Compression-Only enabled, and/or needs to be stored on all-flash vSAN or Hybrid. Never noticed it? Look at the screenshot below.

In the screenshot, you see that you have the ability to specify which data service needs to be enabled. I guess this is where the confusion comes into play, as this functionality is not about enabling the data service for the VM to which you assign the policy. This is about which data service needs to be enabled on the datastore to which the VM can be provisioned. Huh, what? Okay, let’s explain.

If you are using vSAN as your storage platform, and you are sharing vSAN Datastores between clusters leveraging the HCI Mesh feature, then you could find yourself in a situation where some clusters are hybrid and some are all-flash. Some may have data services enabled like Encryption or Deduplication, some may not. In that scenario you want to be able to specify which features need to be enabled for the datastore the VM is provisioned to. So what this “storage rules” feature does is that it ensure that the datastore which is shown as “compatible” actually has the specified capabilities enabled! In other words, if you tick “data-at-rest encryption” in a policy and assign the policy to a VM, then only the datastores which have “data-at-rest encryption” enabled will be shown as compatible with your VM!

So again, “storage rules” apply to the data services that should be enabled on the vSAN Datastore, and do not enable data services on a per VM/VMDK basis.

There’s a new podcast in town, but it is in Dutch!

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I wanted to inform the Yellow-Bricks readers that I started a podcast recently with Frank Denneman and Johan van Amersfoort. The name of the podcast is “In de aap gelogeerd” and that may already reveal that it is not in English, but it is in Dutch. Some may wonder why, well I guess that is easy to explain, all three of us are Dutch. Yes, we know, the podcast would have a bigger reach in English, and we may consider starting an additional podcast over time in English, but for now… just in Dutch. (For now… we are considering a podcast in English as well, but more on that later!)

For those who are Dutch-speaking, we will have a guest every episode starting with the second episode and we will publish a ~ 45-minute episode once every two weeks on Tuesday. The first episode, which just launched, is an introduction to the podcast. The second episode will feature Pim van de Vis (VMware), the third will feature Luc Dekens (retired IT professional), and the fourth will feature Bouke Groenescheij (independent contractor). With each of them, we will be discussing different topics. Of course we have much more planned, but we are not going to reveal that just yet!

If you are interested, you can find the links to find the podcast on any podcast app here, or simply search for “in de aap gelogeerd” in your podcast app of choice! You can also subscribe on youtube here, or follow our podcast account on twitter for the latest news.

Please subscribe, give it a try, and if you have any feedback or like to hear from a particular guest, drop us a note on twitter!