Category Archives: vSphere

Random Short Take #81

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Welcome to Random Short Take #81. Last one for the year, because who really wants to read this stuff over the holiday season? Let’s get random.

Take care of yourselves and each other, and I’ll hopefully see you all on the line or in person next year.

Random Short Take #74

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Welcome to Random Short Take #74. Let’s get random.

Random Short Take #37

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Welcome to Random Short Take #37. Not a huge amount of players have worn 37 in the NBA, but Metta World Peace did a few times. When he wasn’t wearing 15, and other odd numbers. But I digress. Let’s get random.

  • Pavilion Data recently added S3 capability to its platform. It’s based on a variant of MinIO, and adds an interesting dimension to what Pavilion Data has traditionally offered. Mellor provided some good coverage here.
  • Speaking of object storage, Dell EMC recently announced ECS 3.5. You can read more on that here. The architectural white paper has been updated to reflect the new version as well.
  • Speaking of Dell EMC, Preston posted a handy article on Data Domain Retention Lock and NetWorker. Have you pre-ordered Preston’s book yet? I’ll keep asking until you do.
  • Online events are all the rage at the moment, and two noteworthy events are coming up shortly: Pure//Accelerate and VeeamON 2020. Speaking of online events, we’re running a virtual BNEVMUG next week. Details on that here. ZertoCON Virtual is also a thing.
  • Speaking of Pure Storage, this article from Cody Hosterman on NVMe and vSphere 7 is lengthy, but definitely worth the read.
  • I can’t recall whether I mentioned that this white paper  covering VCD on VCF 3.9 is available now, and I can’t be bothered checking. So here it is.
  • I’m not just a fan of Backblaze because of its cool consumer backup solution and object storage platform, I’m also a big fan because of its blog. Articles like this one are a great example of companies doing corporate culture right (at least from what I can see).
  • I have the impression that Datadobi has been doing some cool stuff recently, and this story certainly seems to back it up.

Random Short Take #34

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Welcome to Random Short Take #34. Some really good players have worn 34 in the NBA, including Ray Allen and Sir Charles. This one, though, goes out to my favourite enforcer, Charles Oakley. If it feels like it’s only been a week since the last post, that’s because it has.

  • I spoke to the folks at Rancher Labs a little while ago, and they’re doing some stuff around what they call “Edge Scalability” and have also announced Series D funding.
  • April Fool’s is always a bit of a trying time, what with a lot of the world being a few timezones removed from where I live. Invariably I stop checking news sites for a few days to be sure. Backblaze recognised that these are strange times, and decided to have some fun with their releases, rather than trying to fool people outright. I found the post on Catblaze Cloud Backup inspiring.
  • Hal Yaman announced the availability of version 2.6 of his Office 365 Backup sizing tool. Speaking of Veeam and handy utilities, the Veeam Extract utility is now available as a standalone tool. Cade talks about that here.
  • VMware vSphere 7 recently went GA. Here’s a handy article covering what it means for VMware cloud providers.
  • Speaking of VMware things, John Nicholson wrote a great article on SMB and vSAN (I can’t bring myself to write CIFS, even when I know why it’s being referred to that way).
  • Scale is infinite, until it isn’t. Azure had some minor issues recently, and Keith Townsend shared some thoughts on the situation.
  • StorMagic recently announced that it has acquired KeyNexus. It also announced the availability of SvKMS, a key management system for edge, DC, and cloud solutions.
  • Joey D’Antoni, in collaboration with DH2i, is delivering a webinar titled “Overcoming the HA/DR and Networking Challenges of SQL Server on Linux”. It’s being held on Wednesday 15th April at 11am Pacific Time. If that timezone works for you, you can find out more and register here.

Random Short Take #32

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Welcome to Random Short Take #32. Lot of good players have worn 32 in the NBA. I’m a big fan of Magic Johnson, but honourable mentions go to Jimmer Fredette and Blake Griffin. It’s a bit of a weird time around the world at the moment, but let’s get to it.

  • Veeam 10 was finally announced a little while ago and is now available for deployment. I work for a service provider, and we use Veeam, so this article from Anthony was just what I was after. There’s a What’s New article from Veeam you can view here too.
  • I like charts, and I like Apple laptops, so this chart was a real treat. The lack of ports is nice to look at, I guess, but carrying a bag of dongles around with me is a bit of a pain.
  • VMware recently made some big announcements around vSphere 7, amongst other things. Ather Beg did a great job of breaking down the important bits. If you like to watch videos, this series from VMware’s recent presentations at Tech Field Day 21 is extremely informative.
  • Speaking of VMware Cloud Foundation, Cormac Hogan recently wrote a great article on getting started with VCF 4.0. If you’re new to VCF – this is a great resource.
  • Leaseweb Global recently announced the availability of 2nd Generation AMD EPYC powered hosts as part of its offering. I had a chance to speak with Mathijs Heikamph about it a little while ago. One of the most interesting things he said, when I questioned him about the market appetite for dedicated servers, was “[t]here’s no beating a dedicated server when you know the workload”. You can read the press release here.
  • This article is just … ugh. I used to feel a little sorry for businesses being disrupted by new technologies. My sympathy is rapidly diminishing though.
  • There’s a whole bunch of misinformation on the Internet about COVID-19 at the moment, but sometimes a useful nugget pops up. This article from Kieren McCarthy over at El Reg delivers some great tips on working from home – something more and more of us (at least in the tech industry) are doing right now. It’s not all about having a great webcam or killer standup desk.
  • Speaking of things to do when you’re working at home, JB posted a handy note on what he’s doing when it comes to lifting weights and getting in some regular exercise. I’ve been using this opportunity to get back into garage weights, but apparently it’s important to lift stuff more than once a month.

Cohesity Basics – Excluding VMs Using Tags – Real World Example

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I’ve written before about using VM tags with Cohesity to exclude VMs from a backup. I wanted to write up a quick article using a real world example in the test lab. In this instance, we had someone deploying 200 VMs over a weekend to test a vendor’s storage array with a particular workload. The problem was that I had Cohesity set to automatically protect any new VMs that are deployed in the lab. This wasn’t a problem from a scalability perspective. Rather, the problem was that we were backing up a bunch of test data that didn’t dedupe well and didn’t need to be protected by what are ultimately finite resources.

As I pointed out in the other article, creating tags for VMs and using them as a way to exclude workloads from Cohesity is not a new concept, and is fairly easy to do. You can also apply the tags in bulk using the vSphere Web Client if you need to. But a quicker way to do it (and something that can be done post-deployment) is to use PowerCLI to search for VMs with a particular naming convention and apply the tags to those.

Firstly, you’ll need to log in to your vCenter.

PowerCLI C:\> Connect-VIServer vCenter

In this example, the test VMs are deployed with the prefix “PSV”, so this makes it easy enough to search for them.

PowerCLI C:\> get-vm | where {$_.name -like "PSV*"} | New-TagAssignment -Tag "COH-NoBackup"

This assumes that the tag already exists on the vCenter side of things, and you have sufficient permissions to apply tags to VMs. You can check your work with the following command.

PowerCLI C:\> get-vm | where {$_.name -like "PSV*"} | Get-TagAssignment

One thing to note. If you’ve updated the tags of a bunch of VMs in your vCenter environment, you may notice that the objects aren’t immediately excluded from the Protection Job on the Cohesity side of things. The reason for this is that, by default, Cohesity only refreshes vCenter source data every 4 hours. One way to force the update is to manually refresh the source vCenter in Cohesity. To do this, go to Protection -> Sources. Click on the ellipsis on the right-hand side of your vCenter source you’d like to refresh, and select Refresh.

You’ll then see that the tagged VMs are excluded in the Protection Job. Hat tip to my colleague Mike for his help with PowerCLI. And hat tip to my other colleague Mike for causing the problem in the first place.

VMware – Unmounting NFS Datastores From The CLI

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This is a short article, but hopefully useful. I did a brief article a while ago linking to some useful articles about using NFS with VMware vSphere. I recently had to do some maintenance on one of the arrays in our lab and I was having trouble unmounting the datastores using the vSphere client. I used some of the commands in this KB article (although I don’t have SIOC enabled) to get the job done instead.

The first step was to identify if any of the volumes were still mounted on the individual host.

[root@esxihost:~] esxcli storage nfs list
Volume Name  Host            Share                 Accessible  Mounted  Read-Only   isPE  Hardware Acceleration
-----------  --------------  --------------------  ----------  -------  ---------  -----  ---------------------
Pav05        10.300.300.105  /nfs/GB000xxxxxbbf97        true     true      false  false  Not Supported
Pav06        10.300.300.106  /nfs/GB000xxxxxbbf93        true     true      false  false  Not Supported
Pav01        10.300.300.101  /nfs/GB000xxxxxbbf95        true     true      false  false  Not Supported

In this case there are three datastores that I haven’t been able to unmount.

[root@esxihost:~] esxcli storage nfs remove -v Pav05
[root@esxihost:~] esxcli storage nfs remove -v Pav06
[root@esxihost:~] esxcli storage nfs remove -v Pav01

Now there should be no volumes mounted on the host.

[root@esxihost:~] esxcli storage nfs list
[root@esxihost:~]

See, I told you it would be quick.

VMware vSphere and NFS – Some Links

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Most of my experience with vSphere storage has revolved around various block storage technologies, such as DAS, FC and iSCSI. I recently began an evaluation of one of those fresh new storage startups running an NVMe-based system. We didn’t have the infrastructure to support NVMe-oF in our lab, so we’ve used NFS to connect the datastores to our vSphere environment. Obviously, at this point, it is less about maximum performance and more about basic functionality. In any case, I thought it might be useful to include a series of links regarding NFS and vSphere that I’ve been using to both get up and running, and troubleshoot some minor issues we had getting everything running. Note that most of these links cover vSphere 6.5, as our lab is currently running that version.

Basics

Create an NFS Datastore

How to add NFS export to VMware ESXi 6.5

NFS Protocols and ESXi

Best Practice

Best Practices for running VMware vSphere on Network Attached Storage

Troubleshooting

Maximum supported volumes reached (1020652)

Increasing the default value that defines the maximum number of NFS mounts on an ESXi/ESX host (2239)

Troubleshooting connectivity issues to an NFS datastore on ESX and ESXi hosts (1003967)

Random Short Take #4

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Welcome to the 2017 edition of the Random Short Take. Here are a few links to a few things that I think might be useful, to someone. Maybe.

I’ve been doing some vSphere designs lately, and found these links handy:

I don’t think we’re talking enough about protecting the vCenter Server Appliance. I found these links to be pretty handy.

Need some info on Cisco UCS? Go here.

And if you’re working out power draw in the DC, this might be helpful.

Oracle VM came up in a project I was working on recently. This overview page was a reasonable starting point. Finally, check out Stephen Foskett’s article on ZFS. I thought it was well-balanced and a good read, and the article comments reminded me why I’ve stayed the hell away from that particular community. In any case, if you’re going to be at VMworld US this year, come and say hi.

 

VMware – vSphere Basics – vCenter 6.5 Upgrade Scenarios

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I did an article on the vSphere 6 Platform Services Controller a while ago. After attending a session on changes in vSphere 6.5 at vFORUM, I thought it would be an idea to revisit this, and frame it in the context of vCenter 6.5 upgrades.

 

vSphere Components

In vCenter 6.5, the architecture is a bit different to 5.x. With the PSC, you get:

  • VMware vCenter Single Sign-On
  • License service
  • Lookup service
  • VMware Directory Services
  • VMware Certificate Authority

And the vCenter Server Service gives you:

  • vCenter Server
  • VMware vSphere Web Client
  • VMware vSphere Auto Deploy
  • VMware vSphere ESXi Dump Collector
  • vSphere Syslog Collector on Windows and vSphere Syslog Service for VMware vCenter Server Appliance
  • vSphere Update Manager

 

Architecture Choices

There are some basic configurations that you can go with, but I generally don’t recommend these for anything outside of a lab or test environment. In these configurations, the PSC is either embedded or external to the vCenter Server. The choice here will be dependent on the sizing and feature requirements of your environment.

If you want to use Enhanced Linked Mode an external PSC is recommended. If you want it highly available, you’ll still need to use a load balancer. This VMware KB  article provides some handy insights and updates from 6.0.

 

vCenter Upgrade Scenarios

Your upgrade architecture you’ll choose depends on where your vCenter services reside. If your vCenter server has SSO installed, it becomes a vCenter Server with an embedded PSC.

If, however, some of the vSphere components are installed on separate VMs then the Web Client and Inventory Service become part of the “Management Node” (your vCenter box) and the PSC (with SSO) is separate/external.

Note also that vSphere 6.5 still requires a load balancer for vSphere High Availability.

 

Final Thoughts

This is not something that’s necessarily going to come up each day. But if you’re working either directly with VMware, via an integrator or doing it yourself, your choice of vCenter architecture should be a key consideration in your planning activities. As with most upgrades to key infrastructure components, you should take the time to plan appropriately.