Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcg

What if the disk controller driver included in my vendor’s ESXi image is not on the vSAN HCL?

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Sometimes unfortunately there are situations where a vendor’s ESXi image includes a disk controller driver that is not on the vSAN HCL/VCG (VMware Compatibility Guide). Typically it is a new version of the driver which is supported for vSphere, but not yet for vSAN. In that situation, what should you do? So far there are two approaches I have seen customers take:

  1. Keep running with the included driver and wait for the driver to be supported and listed on the vSAN HCL/VCG
  2. Downgrade the driver to the version which is listed on the vSAN HCL/VCG

Personally, I feel that option 2 is the correct way to go. The reason is simple, vSphere and vSAN have different certification requirements for disk controllers and the vSAN certification criteria are just more stringent than vSphere’s. Hence, sometimes you see vSAN skipping certain versions of drivers, this usually means a version did not pass the tests. Now, of course, you could keep running the driver and wait for it to appear on the vSAN HCL/VC. If however, you hit a problem, VMware Support will always ask you first to bring the environment to a fully supported state. Personally, I would not want the extra stress while troubleshooting. But that is my experience and preference. Just to be clear, from a VMware stance, there’s only one option, and that is option two, downgrade to the supported version!

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

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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

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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: