Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

Performance of vCenter 5.0 in Remote Offices and Branch Offices (ROBO) white paper

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I just finished reading the “Performance of VMware vCenter 5.0 in remote offices and branch offices (ROBO)” white paper. I thought it was an excellent read and recommend it to anyone who has a ROBO environment. Also it is interesting to know what kind of traffic hosts / VMs drive in general to vCenter. Especially the details around the statistics level are worth reading for those deploying larger environments as it also gives a sense of the amount of data that vCenter is processing.

Nice work Fei Chen! You can find the paper here:

Performance of VMware vCenter 5.0 in Remote Offices and Branch Offices (ROBO)
This document details the performance of typical vCenter 5.0 operations in a use case where vCenter manages ESXi hosts over a network with limited bandwidth and high latency, which is also known as a remote office, branch office (ROBO) environment.

(Although the date stamp on this entry says 2010 it is a June / 2012 paper, I will try to get this fixed!)

Creating a nested lab

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I was just building a nested lab to record some demo videos. I find myself googling for this every single time so I figured I would write about it so I can easily get it of my own website. Many have written about this before and all credits go to William Lam and Eric Gray, which are the two  main blogs I have used in the past to get this working.

After installing ESXi on my physical box I “ssh” in to it. In order to allow “nested ESXi” to boot a 64bit OS you will need to run the following:

echo 'vhv.allow = "TRUE"' >> /etc/vmware/config

After you have done that you will want to make sure you will get network connection. Go to your “VM Network” portgroup, or if you named it differently the portgroup that is used to connect the virtual ESXi hosts to. For each of the hosts do the following:

  1. Click on the host
  2. Go to “Configuration”
  3. Click on “Networking”
  4. Click “Properties” on the vSwitch
  5. Select the correct portgroup
  6. Click “Edit”
  7. Click “Security”
  8. Set “Promiscuous Mode” to “Accept”
  9. Click “Ok”
  10. Click “Close”

Now for each virtual ESXi host (note there is a “guest os” called ESXi 5 in there, use it!) that you have created do the following:

  1. Right click on the VM
  2. Click “Edit settings”
  3. Click the “Options” tab
  4. Click on “CPU/MMU virtualization”
  5. Select the 4th option “Use Intel VT-x / AMD-v…”

I am building this out to record a new of “DR of the Cloud”. In other words, 3 virtual clusters + vCloud Director + SRM + vSphere Replication + Virtual Storage Appliances… Cool stuff right.

VMworld session voting

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I submitted several sessions. Of course, just like everyone else, I could use your help when it comes to voting. These are the ones I submitted (or are part of):

  • 1154 – vCloud Director Infrastructure Resiliency – DR of the Cloud – Chris Colotti and Duncan Epping
    In this session Chris and I will focus on vCloud Director infrastructure resilience. Although there is no direct vCloud Director and Site Recovery manager integration, we will look at how to replicate the data, what applications are primary targets, how to size environments, how to maintain multi-tenancy, and what to avoid when architecting these solutions.
  • 1159 – Architecting and Operating a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster – Lee Dilworth and Duncan Epping
    In this session Lee Dilworth and I will discuss the design and operational considerations for vSphere Metro Storage Clusters environments, also commonly referred to as stretched cluster environments. Best practices around implementation and design will be shared. Various failure scenarios which can occur in a stretched storage environment are discussed in-depth including how vSphere 5 responds to these failures.
  • 1202 – Cloud Infrastructure Architecture and Operations Q&A – Chris Colotti, Kamau Wanguhu, Aidan Dalgleish and Duncan Epping
    This is the only session at VMworld which will allow you to freely ask four VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX) questions around how to architect and operate your cloud infrastructure. Our panel holds expertise on Networking, Storage, vCloud Director and vSphere and consists of Chris Colotti (VCDX037), Kamau Wanguhu (VCDX003), Aidan Dalgleish (VCDX010) and Duncan Epping (VCDX007). We will help you make the right decisions while explaining some of the underlying fundamental concepts of the Cloud Infrastructure Suite allowing you to optimize your operations and architecture. This is one of those sessions that you cannot afford to miss out on!
  • 1504 – Ask the Expert vBloggers – Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Rick Scherer, Frank Denneman, Chad Sakac
    One of the highest rated sessions at VMworld is back for it’s fifth year! Come meet four VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX) on stage answering your questions. We get the top Virtualization Bloggers in the industry and get them on stage answering your questions in a wide array of topics.

Of course there are a million other great sessions you should be voting for… Chris Colotti, David Hill, Frank Denneman, Cormac Hogan, Tom Stephens and many others submitted excellent sessions, don’t forget to vote for them as well. Thanks for taking the time!

vCenter Infrastructure Navigator throws the error: “an unknown discovery error has occurred”

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I was deploying vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) in my lab today and the following error came up after I wanted to check dependencies for a virtual machine:

Access failed, an unknown discovery error has occurred

I rebooted several services but nothing seemed to solve it. Internally I bumped on a thread which had the fix for this problem: DNS. Yes I know always DNS right. Anyway, I used “DHCP” for my VIN appliance and this DHCP server pointed to a DNS server which did not have the IP/name of my ESXi hosts listed. Because of this the discovery didn’t work as VIN tries to resolve the names of the hosts as they were added to vCenter Server. I configured VIN with a fixed IP and pointed the VIN appliance to the right DNS server. Problem solved.

Scripts release for Storage vMotion / HA problem

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Last week when the Storage vMotion / HA problem went public I asked both William Lam and Alan Renouf if they could write a script to detect the problem. I want to thank both of them for their quick response and turnaround, they cranked the script out in literally hours. The scripts were validated multiple times in a VDS environment and worked flawless. Note that these scripts can detect the problem in an environment using a regular Distributed vSwitch and a Nexus 1000v, the script can only mitigate the problem though in a Distributed vSwitch environment. Here are the links to the scripts:

Once again thanks guys!