Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Demo Time: How to delete the vCLS VMs

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As I have a bunch of questions about how you can delete the vSphere Cluster Service VMs (vCLS VMs) I figured I would create a quick demo. It is pretty straightforward, and it should only be used when people are doing some kind of full cluster maintenance. This demo shows you how to get the VMs deleted by leveraging a vCenter Server Level Advanced setting (config.vcls.clusters.domain-c<identifier>.enabled). I have also written a post that has a bunch of requirements, Q&A, and considerations for the vCLS VMs, if you are interested in that read it here.

Here’s the summary of how to delete the VMs: Go to your vCenter Server object, go to the configure tab, then go to “Advanced Settings”, add the key “config.vcls.clusters.domain-c<identifier>.enabled” and set it to false. The domain “c-number” for your cluster can be found in the URL when you click on the cluster. It should look something like the following, where the bold part is the important bit: https://vcsa-06.rainpole.com/ui/app/cluster;nav=h/urn:vmomi:ClusterComputeResource:domain-c22:4df0badc-1655-40de-9181-3422d6c36a3e/summary. If you want to recreate the VMs, simply set the value to “true” when the deletion task has completed.

Note, if you have a resource pool configuration, enabling “retreat mode” (disabling vCLS)) doesn’t impact resource pools in any shape or form, it just impacts DRS load balancing. Anyway, I hope you find the demo useful.

How to delete a vCenter Server advanced setting

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I had a customer asking this week how he could delete an advanced setting that he had incorrectly added to vCenter Server. Some of you may have found yourself in this situation as well where you realized you made a typo while creating an advanced setting for the vCenter Server configuration. Unfortunately, there’s no option to delete an advanced setting in the H5 interface, but you can manually remove them via the command-line. It is rather straight forward:

  • SSH to you vCenter Server
  • Go to the “shell”
  • go to director: /etc/vmware-vpx/
  • Edit the file “vpxd.cfg”
  • Simply find the entry and delete the entry (with “vi” you use “/” to search)
  • Restart VPXD by running the following command 
    service-control --restart vmware-vpxd

And that is it, now your advanced setting should be cleared, I will put in a request though for a “delete option” in the H5 interface.

vCenter Server 7.0 U1a released, compatible with SRM!

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I’ve had a bunch of customers asking the past couple of weeks when vSphere / vCenter 7.0 U1 would be supported with SRM. Yesterday (22nd of October) vCenter Server 7.0 U1a was released and this release introduced support/compatibility with SRM. For those wondering why it wasn’t supported, there was an issue with vCLS and SRM which had to be fixed first. So if you are one of those customers who runs the latest and greatest version of vSphere in combination with SRM you can now move to 7.0 U1a. If you haven’t seen the details yet of the release you can find it here:

Start those download engines and plan your upgrades!

VMware vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) considerations, questions and answers.

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In the vSphere 7.0 Update 1 release VMware introduced a new service called the VMware vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS). vCLS provides a mechanism that allows VMware to decouple both vSphere DRS and vSphere HA from vCenter Server. Niels Hagoort wrote a lengthy article on this topic here. You may wonder why VMware introduces this, well as Niels states. by decoupling the clustering services (DRS and HA) from vCenter Server via vCLS we ensure the availability of critical services even when vCenter Server is impacted by a failure.

vCLS is a collection of multiple VMs which, over time, will be the backbone for all clustering services. In the 7.0 U1 release a subset of DRS functionality is enabled through vCLS. Over the past week(s) I have seen many questions coming in and I wanted to create a blog with answers to these questions. When new questions or considerations come up, I will add these to the list below.

[Read more…] about VMware vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) considerations, questions and answers.

vSAN HCI Mesh Considerations

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I did a vSAN File Services Considerations posts earlier this year and recently updated it to include some of the changes that were introduced for vSAN 7.0 U1. Considering vSAN HCI Mesh, aka Datastore Sharing, is also a brand new feature, I figured I would do a similar post. In this post, I am not going to do a deep-dive of the architecture, but I simply want to go over some of the considerations and best practices for implementing vSAN HCI Mesh. I collected these recommendations, and requirements, from our documentation and some VMworld sessions.

First of all, for those who don’t know, vSAN HCI Mesh allows you to mount a remote vSAN Datastore to a vSAN Cluster. In other words, if you have two (or more) vSAN Clusters, you can access the storage capacity from a cluster remotely. Why would you? Well, you can imagine that one cluster is running out of disk space for instance. Or, you may have a hybrid cluster and an all-flash cluster and want to provision a VM from a compute perspective on hybrid, but from a storage point of view on all-flash. By using Datastore Sharing you can now mount the other vSAN Datastore and use it as if it is a local datastore. [Read more…] about vSAN HCI Mesh Considerations