Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

vSphere Metro Storage Cluster white paper released!

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I wanted to point you guys to a white paper that I have worked on for the last months. This white paper was written in collaboration with Lee Dilworth, Ken Werneburg, Frank Denneman and Stuart Hardman. Thanks guys for taking time out of your busy schedule to work with me on this project! This white paper is about vSphere Metro Storage Cluster solutions (aka stretched clusters) and specifically looks at things from a VMware perspective. Enjoy!

  • VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (VMware vMSC) is a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List. This type of configuration is commonly referred to as a stretched storage cluster or metro storage cluster. It is implemented in environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a key requirement. This case study was developed to provide additional insight and information regarding operation of a VMware vMSC infrastructure in conjunction with VMware vSphere. This paper will explain how vSphere handles specific failure scenarios and will discuss various design considerations and operational procedures.
    http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10284

Why is my pathing policy limited to “fixed” or “MRU” with things like MSCS cluster?

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Yesterday I received an email from someone. He wanted to know why he was limited to using either the “fixed” or “MRU” pathing policy for the LUNs attached to his MSCS cluster. In his environment they used round-robin for everything and not being able to configure all of them with the same policy was against their internal policy. The thing is that if round-robin would be used and the path would switch (by default every 1000 I/Os) the SCSI-2 reservation would need to be re-acquired on this LUN. (MSCS uses SCSI-2 reservations for their cluster devices) As you can imagine that could cause a lot of stress on your array and could lead to all sorts of problems. So please do not ignore this recommendation! Some extra details can be found in the following KB articles:

KB article about SvMotion / VDS / HA problem republished with script to mitigate!

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Just a second ago the GSS/KB team republished the KB article that explain the vSphere 5.0 problem around SvMotion / vDS / HA. I wrote about this problem various times and would like to refer to that for more details. What I want to point out here though is that the KB article now has a script attached which will help preventing problems until a full fixed is released. This script is basically the script that William Lam wrote, but it has been fully tested and vetted by VMware. For those running vSphere 5.0 and using SvMotion on VMs attached to distributed switches I urge you to use the script. I expect that the PowerCLI version will also be attached soon.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2013639

Navigating your application landscape…

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I was on a holiday the last two weeks and slowly catching up on everything that happened. Some of you might think it wasn’t a lot, but in the world of cloud and virtualization it was. Not only was there a huge EUC launch event but also a new version of vCenter Infrastructure Navigator was released. Somehow it has been amazingly quiet around this product. Something I didn’t really understand, especially not after reading the release notes of version 1.1 of vCenter Infrastructure Navigator. Two things stood out:

  • vCloud Director support
  • Infrastructure Navigator discovers VMware services, such as Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Server, VMware View Server, VMware vCloud Director Server, and VMware vShield Manager Server.

For those who don’t know, Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plugin for vCenter Server. This enables you to  get a better understanding of what is running on top of your virtual infrastructure. A lot of you may say, well why would I care? Think about DR for a second. What is the most challenging part of creating a DR Plan? Indeed, figuring out all dependencies. That is exactly where vCenter Infrastructure Navigator comes in to play as shown in the screenshot below, which I stole from Ben Scheerer. Ben wrote an excellent blog about some of the cool new features in vCenter Infrastructure Navigator, I am not going to repeat those just read his. It is worth it if you are serious about providing the best service to your (internal) customers!

 

 

Problems using the vCenter Web Client

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I was doing some upgrades in my lab and ran in to an issue. Whenever I started the vCenter Web Client I got a message that the vCenter Inventory Service wasn’t running. I looked at my Services section in Windows 2008 and found that it wasn’t started. Starting it gave me a new error: 1067. This is very generic but I figured I would google it anyway. That actually brought me to our own documentation, yes I should check that first next time, and it mentioned I could reset the inventory service as follows:

  • Stop the service (was already stopped)
  • Delete the entire contents of the Inventory_Service_Directory/data directory
  • Change directory to Inventory_Service_directory/scripts
  • Run the createDB.bat command, with no arguments, to reset the vCenter Inventory Service database
  • Run the register.bat command to update the stored configuration information of the Inventory Service
    register.bat vcenter-tm01.testlab.local 443
  • Restart the vCenter Inventory Service

I also had to re-register the Web Client to vCenter Server. This is what I had to do:

  • admin-cmd.bat register https://vcenter-tm01.testlab.local:9443/vsphere-client https://vcenter-tm01.testlab.local administrator password
Hope it helps,