Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vSphere

Changing the vSAN Skyline Health Interval

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On the VMTN forum Lars asked a great question, how do you change the vSAN Skyline Health interval. This used to be an option in the UI pre vSphere 7.0 but now seems to have disappeared. I never really touched it, so I had completely forgotten it was even an option at first. As vSAN also has an extensive CLI through “RVC”, and I used RVC before to disable a particular health check I figured this may also be a configurable setting, and indeed it is. It is rather straightforward:

SSH to your vCenter Server instance and open RVC. I use the following command to open an RVC session:

rvc administrator@vsphere.local@localhost

I then “cd” into my vSAN cluster object. Simply do an “ls” after you “cd” into a directory. My complete tree looks like this:

/localhost/Datacenter/computers/Cluster

When you are at the cluster level simply check the current configured interval:

vsan.health.health_check_interval_status .

Next you can configure the new internal, default setting is 60 minutes, but you can change it anywhere between 15 minutes and 1 day, I am configuring it to 15 minnutes:

vsan.health.health_check_interval_configure -i 15 .

Unexplored Territory #006: Event-driven automation (VEBA) with William Lam!

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In this sixth episode, we talk to William Lam, Senior Staff Architect in the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware about event-driven automation. William explains what event-driven automation is, how customers are using it today, and why you should also consider trying out the VMware Event Broker Appliance! (https://flings.vmware.com/vmware-event-broker-appliance) Enjoy the episode, and if you haven’t done so yet, make sure to subscribe! You can also listen via your podcast apps of course for Apple: apple.co/3pxet9P Spotify: spoti.fi/3mW19dt Google: bit.ly/3pDoUJ3

Why does HA not power-on VMs after a full cluster shutdown?

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I received this question and figured I would write a quick post about it, as it comes up occasionally. Why does vSphere HA no power-on VMs after a full cluster is brought back online after a full cluster shutdown? In this case, the customer had a power outage, so their hosts and all VMs were powered off, by an administrator cleanly, as a result of the backup power unit running out of power. Unfortunately, this happens more frequently than you would think.

When VMs are powered off by an administrator, or anyone/anything (PowerCLI etc) else which has permissions to power off VMs, then vCenter Server will mark these VMs as “cleanly powered off”. Next, also the state of the VMs is tracked by vSphere HA. So if a host is powered off, HA will know if the VM was powered on, or powered off at the time the host goes missing.

Now, when the host (or hosts) returns for duty, vSphere HA will of course verify what the last known state was of the cluster. It will read the list of all the VMs that were powered on, and it will restart those that were powered on and are configured for HA. It will also look at a VM property called “runtime.cleanPowerOff”, this property indicates if the VM was cleanly powered off by an Admin or a script, or if the VM was for instance powered off by vSphere HA itself. (PDL response etc.) Depending on the value of the property, the VM will, or will not be restarted.

Having said all of that, when you power off a VM manually through the UI, or via a script, then the VM will be marked as being “cleanly powered off”. This means that HA has no reason to restart it, as the powered-off VM is not the result of a host, network, or storage failure.

Unexplored Territory #005: AI Enterprise, DPUs, and NVIDIA Launchpad with Luke Wignall

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Episode 005 is out! This time we talk to Luke Wignall, who is the Director of Technical Product Marketing at NVIDIA. We talk about some of the announcements made during the NVIDIA GTC Conference. Luke discusses NVIDIA Launchpad, AI Enterprise, and of course, we touch on DPUs aka SmartNICs. A great conversation with A LOT of information to digest. Enjoy the episode, and if you haven’t done so yet, make sure to subscribe! You can also listen via your podcast apps of course for Apple: https://apple.co/3lYZGCF, Google: https://bit.ly/3oQVarH, Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3INgN3R.