Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vSphere

vCenter 7.0 stating “New vCenter server updates are available” while there are no updates?

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I have seen this issue reported on the VMware Community Forum a few times, when you run vCenter 7.0 you will receive a message in the vSphere Client stating the following “New vCenter server updates are available”. When you then click “View Updates” however you will notice that there are no updates available for vCenter Server and you are indeed running the latest and greatest version. We (Cormac and I) actually encountered the issue in our lab as well, which is demonstrated in the screenshot below.

Pretty confusing indeed. Please note that this is a known issue, there’s no need to report this to VMware. Soon a patch will be released for vCenter Server which will fix this problem.

The issue is fixed in 7.0b as documented in the release notes!

Running vSphere 6.7 or 6.5 and configured HA APD/PDL responses? Read this…

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If you are running vSphere 6.7 or 6.5 and have not installed 6.7 P02 yet (6.5 P05 is available soon) and you have APD/PDL responses configured within vSphere HA it could be that an issue causes VMs not to be failed over when an APD or PDL occurs. This is a known issue in the release, and P02 or P05 solves this problem. What is the problem? Well, a bug causes VMs which are listed in “VM overrides” to have settings that are not configured to be set to “disabled” instead of “unset”, in specific the APD/PDL setting.

This means that even though you have APD/PDL responses configured on a cluster level, the VM level configuration overrides it as it would be set to “disabled”. It doesn’t matter really why you added them to VM Overrides, could be to configure VM Restart Priority for instance. The frustrating part is that the UI doesn’t show you it is disabled as it looks like it is not configured.

If you can’t install the patch just yet, for whatever reason, but you do have VMs in VM Overrides, make sure to go to VM Overrides and explicitly configure the VMs to have the APD/PDL responses enabled similar to what it is configured to on a cluster level as shown in the screenshots below.

vSphere HA internals: restart placement changes in vSphere 7!

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Frank and I are looking to update the vSphere Clustering deep dive to vSphere 7. While scoping the work I stumbled on to something interesting, and this is the change that was introduced for the vSphere HA restart mechanism,  and specifically the placement of VMs in vSphere 7. In previous releases vSphere HA had a straight forward way of doing placement for VMs when VMs need to be restarted as a result of a failure. In vSphere 7.0 this mechanism was completely overhauled.

So how did it work pre-vSphere 7?

  • HA uses the cluster configuration
  • HA uses the latest compatibility list it received from vCenter
  • HA leverages a local copy of the DRS algorithm with a basic (fake) set of stats and runs the VMs through the algorithm
  • HA receives a placement recommendation from the local algorithm and restarts the VM on the suggested host
  • Within 5 minutes DRS runs within vCenter, and will very likely move the VM to a different host based on actual load

As you can imagine this is far from optimal. So what is introduced in vSphere 7? Well, we introduce two different ways of doing placement for restarts in vSphere 7:

  1. Remote Placement Engine
  2. Simple Placement Engine

The Remote Placement Engine, in short, is the ability for vSphere HA to make a call to DRS for the recommendation of the placement of a VM. This will take the current load of the cluster, the VM happiness, and all configured affinity/anti-affinity/vm-host affinity rules into consideration! Will this result in a much slower restart? The great thing is that the DRS algorithm has been optimized over the past years and it is so fast that there will not be a noticeable difference between the old mechanism and the new mechanism. Added benefit of course for the engineering team is that they can remove the local DRS module, which means there’s less code to maintain. How this works is that the FDM Master communicated with the FDM Manager which runs in vCenter Server. FDM Manager communicates with the DRS service to request a placement recommendation.

Now some of you will probably wonder what happens when vCenter Server is unavailable, well this is where the Simple Placement Engine comes into play. The team has developed a new placement engine that basically takes a round-robin approach, but does consider of course “must rules” (VM to Host) and the compatibility list. Note, affinity, or anti-affinity rules, are not considered when SPE is used instead of RPE! This is a known limitation, which is considered to be fixed in the future. If a host, for instance, is not connected to the datastore the VM is running on that needs to be restarted than that host is excluded from the list of potential placement targets. By the way, before I forget, version 7 also introduced a vCenter heartbeat mechanism as a result. HA will be heart beating the vCenter Server instance to understand when it will need to resort to the Simple Placement Engine vs the Remote Placement Engine.

I dug through the FDM log to find some proof of these new mechanisms, (/var/log/fdm.log) and found an entry that shows there are indeed two placement engines:

Invoking the RPE + SPE Placement Engine

RPE stands for “remote placement engine”, and SPE for “simple placement engine”. Where Remote of course refers to DRS. You may ask yourself, how do you know if DRS is being called? Well, that is something you can see in the logs in the DRS log files, when a placement request is received, the below entry shows up in the log file:

FdmWaitForUpdates-vim.ClusterComputeResource:domain-c8-26307464

This even happens when DRS is disabled and also when you use a license edition which does not include DRS even, which is really cool if you ask me. If for whatever reason vCenter Server is unavailable, and as a result DRS can’t be called, you will see this mentioned in the FDM log, and as shown below, it will use the Simple Placement Engine’s recommendation for the placement of the VM:

Invoke the placement service to process the placement update from SPE

A cool and very useful small HA enhancement if you ask me for vSphere 7.0!

 

** Disclaimer: This article contains references to the words master and/or slave. I recognize these as exclusionary words. The words are used in this article for consistency because it’s currently the words that appear in the software, in the UI, and in the log files. When the software is updated to remove the words, this article will be updated to be in alignment. **

vSphere HA internals: VMCP super aggressive option in vSphere 7

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Most of you probably heard about a feature called VMCP aka VM Component Protection. If not, this is the functionality in vSphere HA that enabled you to restart VMs which have been impacted by a PDL (permanent device loss) or APD (all paths down) scenario. (If you have no idea what I am talking about read this article first.)

When you configure the APD response you have four options:

  1. Disable
  2. Issue Event
  3. Power Off / Restart – Conservative
  4. Power Off / Restart – Aggressive

The main difference between Conservative and Aggressive is that if you find yourself in a situation where HA isn’t sure whether a VM can be restarted during an APD scenario it will not power off the VM when using Conservative. If you have it configured as Aggressive it will power off the VM. However, if HA is certain that a VM can’t be powered on it will not power off the VM. Basically it prefers availability of the VM.

As you can imagine, in certain scenarios having a VM running while it is impacted by an “APD” situation makes no sense. The VM has lost access to storage, and you simply may prefer to kill the workload. Why? Well, when it loses access to storage it can’t write to disk. You could find yourself in a situation where a change is acknowledged and you think it is written to disk but it somehow is sitting in a memory cache etc.

If you prefer the VM to be killed, regardless of whether it can be restarted or not, you can enable this via a vSphere HA advanced setting. Now before you implement this, do note that if a cluster-wide APD situation occurs, you could find yourself in the scenario where ALL virtual machines are powered off by HA and not restarted as the resources are not available. Anyway, if you feel this is a requirement, you can configure the following vSphere HA advanced setting in vSphere 7:

das.restartVmsWithoutResourceChecks = true

vSAN File Services: Seeing an imbalance between protocol stack containers and FS VMs

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Last week I had this question around vSAN File Services and an imbalance between protocol stack containers and FS VMs. I personally had witnessed the same thing and wasn’t even sure what to expect. So what does this even mean, an imbalance? Well as I have already explained, every host in a vSAN Cluster which has vSAN File Services enabled will have a File Services VM. Within these VMs you will have protocol stack containers running, up to a maximum of 8 protocol stack containers per cluster. Just look at the diagram below.

Now this means that if you have 8 hosts, or less, in your cluster that by default every FS VM in your cluster will have a protocol stack container running. But what happens when you go into maintenance mode? When you go into maintenance mode the protocol stack container moves to a different FS VM, so you end up in a situation where you will have 2 (or more even) protocol stack containers running within 1 FS VM. That is the imbalance I just mentioned. More than 1 protocol stack container per FS VM, while you have an FS VM with 0 protocol stack containers. If you look at the below screenshot, I have 6 protocol stack containers, but as you can see we have the bottom two on the same ESXi host, and there’s no protocol stack container on host “dell-f”.

How do you even this out? Well, it is simple, it takes some time. vSAN File Services will look at your distribution of protocol stack containers every 30 minutes. Do mind, it will take the number of file shares associated with the protocol stack containers into consideration. If you have 0 file shares associated with a protocol stack container then vSAN isn’t going to bother balancing it, as there’s no point at that stage. However, if you have a number of shares and each protocol stack container owns one, or more, shares than balancing will happen automatically. Which is what I witness in my lab. Within 30 minutes I saw the situation changing as shown in the screenshot below, a nice evenly balanced file services environment! (Protocol stack container ending with .215 moved to host “dell-f”.)