Category: VMware

VMUG, VMware, VMworld

VMUG for Germany west (Frankfurt)

Bas Raayman

Just a small reminder for the people that live in my area. On Tuesday, December 4th, the German VMware User Group (VMUG) west will be meeting up in Frankfurt. In case you don’t know what the VMUG is for, here’s a quick summary:

The VMware User Group (VMUG) is an independent, global, customer-led organization, created to maximize members’ use of VMware and partner solutions through knowledge sharing, training, collaboration, and events.

The beauty of it? It’s something set up by users for other users. That means that people come to these events to get information that is vendor neutral, and have the ability to talk freely to others without having to fear that someone is trying to only give them the marketing pitch. Or at least, that is what it should be like.

So, the Germany West VMUG Meeting is at Tuesday, December 4, 2012 at the following address and time:

10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Dell Solution Center
Main Airport Center
Unterschweinstiege 10
Frankfurt Am Main, Germany 60549

You can use this link to register for the event, free of charge, and get to see Mike Laverick give a talk on “Cloud and disaster recovery”, and more DR topics. Plus, you get the chance to go over some of the VMworld Labs.

I’ll be there, and I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

VAAI, VMware, vSphere

vBrownbag – VAAI on NFS session during VMworld

Bas Raayman

Well, after being in Barcelona for a week for VMworld Europe, and after some other things that I had going on, I wanted to take some time to throw out a quick blog post on somethign that I have been getting positive feedback on.

If you aren’t familiar already with the vBrownbag initiative, make sure to check it out at http://professionalvmware.com/brownbags/. To quote from the site:

The ProfessionalVMware #vBrownBag is a series of online webinars held using GotoMeeting and covering various Virtualization & VMware Certification topics.

While VMworld was going on, some of the vBrownbag crew were visiting, and set up short 10 minute sessions in which presenters could come by and discuss various topics. Topics ranging from VCDX certification, “unsupported” sessions which showed off some neat unsupported tricks, and other topics.

Fellow blogger Julian Wood, actually put up a great blog post over on wooditwork.com that directly shows you all of the recorded sessions, including my own which is titled: “VAAI tips, specifics, common pitfalls and caveats on NFS”.

It’s good that it adds video and audio commentary, but I thought I’d also add the slides, which you can find here:

http://app.sliderocket.com:80/app/fullplayer.aspx?id=34d7923b-017c-435b-8ea7-043ab0a895da

I hope that it’s of use to you, and look forward to your feedback.

Certification, Virtualization, VMware

VCAP5-DCA – My test experience

Bas Raayman

I took the VCAP5-DCA this morning, and let me start off with one thing that is key to this exam: time management!

On July 19th, VMware released the VCAP5-DCA exam. Unlike the VCAP5-DCD, this is an exam that focuses on hands-on, solving configuration problems and setting up new configurations. You do this on actual live systems, and you have the normal vCenter help available as well as PDF versions of the help files.

What does the exam environment look like?

Basically, you open up an RDP session on a 1280 x 1024 screen. Inside of this screen, you will find a small bar with shortcuts to the items you need (think RDP, vCenter Client). Easy enough to get started with, but since you don’t have a window manager that allows you to switch between programs, it can be hard to keep track of what window you are in. Also, when switching between windows, your window focus is usually off, so when you start typing nothing is showing up. You always have the option to check what the usernames and passwords are, although the password is the same for all accounts. Save some time by not maximising the windows, but create a custom size. That way you can keep track of open windows.

Is it a good exam?

Ehm… Yes, it is… Most of the time. I had one glitch during my exam where a required preconfigured item would not work. The tasks in the exam actually tell you that you need to have certain things configured because further parts of the exam will build up on these things. For me, one of those preconfigured items didn’t work, and there isn’t really a way to have this fixed during the exam. That can be quite frustrating, plus it takes up valuable time to actually troubleshoot.

Which brings me to my next point. I mentioned it before, but time management is key. You’ll be in the exam room for 4 hours for non-native English speakers and 3.5 for native English speakers, and that is a lot of time, but with 26 tasks, that means roughly 8 to 9 minutes per task. One thing that might help you, is to use the notepad that you get when you go in to the room. Note down the numbers 1 through 26, and create a note when you finish a task or if something is still open. Don’t wait for a task to finish, but move on to the next. Unfortunately, you can’t mark the question to review at the end, so having a note which questions you need to re-visit is quite helpful.

In my case? I actually did run out of time. I wasn’t able to complete 3 tasks. I was fairly confident going in to the exam, and I came out feeling pretty drained. It’s a good exam in the sense that it covers things that any advanced admin can run in to, and some that an admin will run in to. Common things like the stopping and starting of services, or administration of your storage devices might be an every day task, PowerCLI might be less common. Some folks will use Auto Deploy, and some might have other infrastructures in place to accommodate things like installations.

So what do I study?

Brush up on what you don’t know that well. The exam isn’t unbeatable, but it will give you a run for your money. Try to focus on scenarios that make sense to you, and that you would expect as an advanced admin. Brush up on a bit of PowerCLI if you haven’t before. Work with storage if you can (download one of the many virtual storage appliances out there and toy with it), and brush up on your troubleshooting skills. If you have a co-worker, have him mix up some settings in a lab/test environment and try to resolve the issues.

Also, get hands-on time! Even if someone were to give you a list of all the required tasks, you will need to know your way around. There is only one advantage here, and that is getting your hands dirty. In my case, the exam environment was pretty snappy, but anything that involved scrolling was just horribly slow. Be prepared to work in an environment that you don’t know that well. And one more tip for the people working with a non-US keyboard: Learn to use a US keyboard layout. In my case, normally you would expect a German layout on the keyboard. Well, the actual physical keyboard was a UK layout, and the keyboard in my RDP session was a US version. I can touch-type on a US keyboard, which helped, but not everyone will be so lucky.

Any other tips?

Yep, also check out some of the other online resources and experiences, for example this post by Ed Grigson, or this post by Patrick Kramer. Also, check out this study guide on VirtualLanger.com, or these study resources from TheSaffaGeek.

And did you pass?

I don’t know yet. I will get my results “in approximately 15 business days”, so until that time I’ll just have to wait it out. But, pass or fail, I learned a couple of my weak spots (which I thought weren’t that weak when I started the test), and even if I should have failed, I learned additional things by studying, so the time wasn’t wasted. Either way, I’ll update this post once the result comes in. 🙂

Update – September 28th:
Got a mail during the night confirming I passed. 🙂

Virtualization, VMware, VMworld, vSphere

VMware releases vSphere 5.1

Bas Raayman

Today, at VMworld in San Francisco, VMware released a new version of their virtualization platform, namely vSphere 5.1.

To anyone who has been working with vSphere for some time, the version number won’t be that big of a surprise. Also, just before the weekend, the new version number actually showed up in the VMware Compatibility Guide (and was taken offline again over the weekend). But, as little surprise as the version number was, there was one quite big surprise that went along with all of the sparkly new features: A change in the licensing model.

Rumors were already circulating a week before the convention, and this change certainly wasn’t an easy decision for VMware. I was in an early partner briefing, and while we were getting the briefing, there were still mails going around inside of VMware, and a change in the licensing policy was actually communicated via an internal mail during the briefing. Since most people didn’t really like the change in licensing that came with vSphere 5, VMware made a subsequent change in its new licensing policy just a month after releasing vSphere 5.

So, what changed in the licensing department?

It all become much easier to deal with, since VMware dropped the VRAM licensing model. Yes, you read that right, VMware is no longer charging the virtualized RAM. The short version is this:

vRAM licensing is no longer used, the licensing is now per CPU socket.

There are other changes like the VMware vCloud Suite, but I will cover this in a different post.

And what is new in the technology department?

Well, the usual upgrade in terms of bumped maximums:

  • Up to 64 virtual CPUs
  • Up to 1TB of vRAM
  • Up to 32 hosts can now access a linked clone
  • 16Gb FC HBA support

And more things that will put vSphere and Hyper-V on par from a maximums standpoint. But I don’t really think that those limits are interesting. To find the latest maximums we can have a look at the configuration maximums guide. So, what else has changed?

  • Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration (vSGA)
    “vSGA expands upon existing non‐hardware accelerated graphics capabilities for basic 3D workloads, by supporting accelerating VDI workloads using physical GPU resources. With this new capability, it is now possible to virtualize physical GPU resources, sharing them across virtual desktops. This functionality supports an array of graphically rich and intense applications such as full motion video, rich media services, and more demanding 3D graphics”To actually use this feature, you currently need an NVIDIA GPU that is based on the GF100 architecture (Fermi) such as the Quadro 4000, Quadro 5000 or Quadro 6000  series. For people who like to dig around, this is also what the X server is for in the installation media.
  • No more reboots to upgrade the VMware tools
    You read that right. You can now perform an online upgrade of the VMware tools for any VM that is running Windows Vista, or a later Windows release.
  • Network Health Check
    “Assures proper physical and virtual operation by providing health monitoring for physical network setups including VLAN, MTU or Teaming. Today, vSphere administrators have no tools to verify whether the physical setup is capable of deploying virtual machines correctly. Even simple physical setups can be frustrating to debug end to end. Network health check eases these issues by giving you a window into the operation of your physical and virtual network”
  • Single Sign On (SSO)
    “The vSphere 5.1 SSO feature simplifies the login process for the Cloud Infrastructure Suite. You can log into the management infrastructure a single time through the vSphere Web Client or the API and be able to perform operations across all components of the Cloud Infrastructure Suite without having to log into the components separately SSO operates across all Cloud Infrastructure Suite components that support this feature.”This is a great addition. You can now use your vCenter installation as a SSO source, or you can integrate directly in to existing OpenLDAP and Active Directory sources. Scheme support is present for LDAP, LDAPS and NIS.
  • vMotion
    You can now simultaneously vMotion memory and storage. I hear you thinking that “you could do that for a while now”, and you are correct. But with vSphere 5.1, you can finally do it online. Additionally, there is no need for shared storage to perform a vMotion. This means that you can use local disks, inside of your hosts, and online migrate your virtual machines between hosts without having centralised storage, using NBD/NFC in the background. In my book, this is a great feature when working with a home lab.

Those are some pretty neat things, and there are even more out there, but there is one major change that I wanted to save. Previously, VMware announced the vSphere Web Client about a year ago (David Davis has done a nice writeup of it here), and set the tone for the future interface. Now, in vSphere 5, they made it very clear:

To use new things like the newer VM hardware version, the shared nothing vMotion, or any of the other new features, you have to use the new vSphere Web Client.

And that’s ok. The Web Client works like a charm. It did have some smaller bugs during testing, but to me proved to be quite reliable and easy to use. Plus, it allows you to search for objects from any location, adds features like custom tags that you can add to resources, and has modifications that make life easier. An example of that last point, is when you add a new datastore to a host. If you re-use the name, the Web Client will detect this, and will ask you if you would like to use the same settings, saves a bit of time.

There is one problem with this strategy though. You won’t be able to completely switch to the Web Client. For four tasks, you will still need the classic vSphere Client:

  • Import and export host profiles. You cannot import or export host profiles with the vSphere Web Client.
  • vSphere Update Manager. vSphere Update Manager isn’t available in the vSphere Web Client.
  • Datastore Browser inflate thin disk option. The Datastore Browser in the vSphere Client has an option to inflate a thin disk to a thick disk. The vSphere Web Client does not have this option. You cannot inflate a thin disk using the vSphere Web Client.
  • vSphere Authentication Proxy Server.

That might change once the final version is available for download though. Also, with the Web Client, the way that vCenter plugins work, has changed. This will mean that if you rely on any plugins for your daily operation, now is the time to contact your software/hardware vendor, and ask them if they are planning on the release of a new plugin that will work in the Web Client.

All in all?

All in all, I would say that with vSphere 5.1, the maximum configurations were aligned with what other hypervisors offer, and we again see some nice additions in functionality. A lot of folks will welcome the change in licensing policy, and all of those Mac users will welcome the fact that they can now perform their daily administration, without having to install a VM or connect to a remote desktop.

Some things aren’t entirely logical, like the fact that not all of the functionality was ported to the Web Client (yet), but I think it’s safe to say that there is more good than bad in this release. If you want to learn more about the technical side, or the rest of the VMware vCloud Suite, make sure to check every now and then, since I’ll be posting follow ups with exactly that info. In terms of the software being released, we are still waiting for an official release date, but I’ll update this posting once the date has been announced.

Update – August 31st:

The Dutch VMware Twitter account (VMware_NL) just gave me an expected release date for the vCloud Suite, and for vSphere 5.1: September 11th 2012. Keep in mind that this may change though.

Update – September 18th:
You can now actually download the release. It went live during my holiday, so I didn’t update the post. Download it from the VMware website. Also, the configuration maximums guide got released. Download it at: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r51/vsphere-51-configuration-maximums.pdf.

Virtualization, VMware, VMworld, vSphere

vSphere 5.1 launch – Link Collection

Bas Raayman

There’s a lot of articles going online at the moment, due to the launch of vSphere 5.1, and due to the fact that everyone, – myself included – has their share to say.

Since it will be hard to keep track of everything that is put online, I’d thought I’d help us all out by creating a page with links to the various blog posts and articles. So here goes:

The official VMware links:

Obviously there are also a lot of other posts going online, so here are the…

other links:

If you feel like I missed a link, please let me know in the comments, or send me a tweet.

Fusion, Uncategorized, Virtualization, VMware

VMware releases Fusion 5

Bas Raayman

Some folks on Twitter already spotted it: It seems like along with the release of VMware Workstation 9, the guys and girls over at VMware also released Fusion 5.

And with this new release come some expected things. As always, it’s bigger, better and faster. It adds suport for some of the new operating systems that are out there, for example, there is full support for Mountain Lion, and suppport was added for the new MacBook Pro with retina displays. Windows 8 support is finally built in, and they didn’t only think about the Redmond users, but also added 3D desktop support for selected Linux distributions, and one really cool feature (if your Mac is new enough to support it) is that you can use Airplay to display your VM on a TV using an Apple TV.

VMware claims that there are over 70 new features in the new version of Fusion, but I wasn’t able to locate the entire list as of yet. If I do find that list, I’ll be sure to add it to my post. In the meantime, here is the marketing shortlist:

  • Optimized for OS X Mountain Lion
  • Optimized for Windows 8
  • Designed for latest Macs
  • Faster performance
  • Retina Display Optimization
  • USB 3 support
  • Enhanced battery management
  • Enhanced UI
  • 1-click snapshot
  • Linux 3D
  • Embedded Learning Center

In the meantime, if you purchased your copy of VMware Fusion 4 from July 25th through September 30th, 2012, you are covered by the VMware Fusion “Technology Guarantee Program”, and you are eligible for a complimentary electronic upgrade to VMware Fusion 5. You can find out all about that here: http://www.vmware.com/support/product-support/fusion/faq/licensing.html?cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk

If you want to test out this new version, go right ahead and download a trial here: http://www.vmware.com/go/tryfusion, or to immediately purchase the new version, follow this link: http://www.vmware.com/go/buyfusion. Be sure to do a quick Google search on discount codes, since there are bound to be some upgrade offers out there. 🙂

EMC, Symmetrix, V-MAX, vCenter Operations, Virtualization, VMware

Setting up the EMC Symmetrix adapter on the vCenter Operations Manager 5 vApp

Bas Raayman

I present a lot on vCenter Operations Manager, a pretty neat monitoring tool from VMware. I like this tool a lot, because getting started with it is easy enough, and you have a plethora of features once you dive deeper in to it, and the best part about it? If you use the “big” version, -Enterprise or Enterprise Plus that is-, you can even monitor your applications and non-virtualized infrastructure. To monitor your things that go beyond your virtual machines, you can install so called “adapters”. In a nutshell, such an adapter is nothing more than a piece of software that tells vCenter Operations how to connect to things, and how to interpret the results it gets back. Now, EMC has created such an adapter for their VMAX and Symmetrix storage arrays, and has created a document that tells you how to set up and configure the adapter. That way, you can get loads of information from your storage system inside of vCenter Operations. Great stuff, right? Original image from: http://my.opera.com/supergreatChandu8/albums/showpic.dml?album=5466862&picture=82475462Yeah ok, maybe not so great. The biggest problem, is that the documentation seems to have been created for the normal installable version of vCenter Operations. However, VMware has also created a version in the form of an appliance, a so called vApp. You download the files, deploy the vApp, enter the IP-addresses of both virtual machines that are contained in the vApp, and away you go. Wonderfully easy to install, and besides certain limits in scalability, it offers pretty much the same functionality as the normal installer. This is where the problem starts if you want to use the EMC Symmetrix adapter. You can find almost all adapters on the Integrien FTP site, and there’s a folder containing all the files you need to get started with the Symmetrix adapter right here. My teammate Matt Cowger actually wrote a nice blog post on how to configure and set up the Symmetrix adapter. This works like a charm, except for one tiny thing that you will run in to when using the vCenter Operations vApp. When you go to create an adapter instance, you need to give it a name, indicate if you want to auto discover everything, and you need to input a path to the “EMC Symmetrix Main Input Folder”. This is the folder where you actually archive all of the performance and configuration data from your storage system. The documentation tells you that this should be:

* If the main input folder is on a remote Windows machine, you must share the folder before you add the adapter instance. Do not map the main input folder. Windows services do not work with mapped drives. * If the main input folder is on a remote Linux machine, you must mount the folder to the Collector server before you add the adapter instance.

Problem being, that if you actually have your Solutions Enabler host running on Windows, you need to input a UNC path in the format of \\servername\sharename. But the problem here is that the virtual machines inside the vApp do not come with any access methods for Windows shares. You won’t find any tools like mount.cifs, smbclient or even have the option to specify smbfs as the type of file system to mount. And that means what? Well, you will have two options to overcome this situation. You can either install the Services for Unix/Services for NFS on your Windows host and set up an NFS share on your Windows machine. Or, you can migrate your Solutions Enabler host to a Linux machine and set up everything there. OK, so how do I configure this stuff under Linux? Glad you asked. You can follow some of the steps from the post that Matt created, but I’m going to write them down here anyway so you will have one page with all the steps you need. I’m going to assume that you have already set up your Linux machine, and that you have installed the Solutions Enabler package. Go in to the following file: /usr/emc/API/symapi/config and add these following lines at the end of the file, then make sure you save your changes (create a backup of the original, this is always a good idea):

storstpd:dmn_run_spa = disable
storstpd:dmn_run_smc = disable
storstpd:dmn_run_ttp = enable
storstpd:dmn_run_ttp_on_sp = disable
storstpd:dmn_run_rtc = disable
storstpd:ttp_collection_interval = 5
storstpd:ttp_rdflnk_metrics = enable
storstpd:ttp_se_tcp_metrics = enable
storstpd:ttp_se_nw_metrics = enable
storstpd:ttp_dev_metrics = disable
storstpd:ttp_disk_metrics = disable
storstpd:ttp_dgdev_metrics = enable
storstpd:ttp_se_tcp_metrics = enable
storstpd:ttp_se_nw_metrics = enable
storstpd:ttp_se_nwi_metrics = enable
storstpd:ttp_re_sg_metrics = enable
storstpd:ttp_re_nwc_metrics = enable
storstpd:ttp_rdflnk_metrics = enable
storstpd:ttp_se_tcp_metrics = enable
storstpd:ttp_se_nw_metrics = enable
storstpd:use_compression = enable

Next, restart the storstpd daemon:

/opt/emc/SYMCLI/bin/stordaemon shutdown storstpd /opt/emc/SYMCLI/bin/stordaemon start storstpd

Check if the daemon is up and running again by issuing the following command. The first line should show the Daemon State as “Running”:

/opt/emc/SYMCLI/bin/stordaemon show storstpd

Now, since the Analytics VM will be actually collecting the information from the adapter, it needs to be able to access the files from your Solutions Enabler host. Since the Analytics VM will be running the collection process as a user called “Admin”, we need to consider something. The admin user on the vCenter Operations appliance will be running with a user ID (UID) of 1000, and a group ID (GID) of 1003. That means that we should either install our Solutions Enabler using a user with the same user ID and group ID, or we need to map some things so that the admin user can actually access the files later on. In order to export the directory with the required files for the Symmetrix adapter, we will add the following line to /etc/exports: /usr/emc/API/symapi/stp *(rw,insecure,all_squash,anonuid=0,anongid=0) Obviously, this isn’t the best you can do from a security perspective, so feel free to change these options as needed for your environment, but basically what we are doing here is this:

  • The * just means that all IP-addresses have access. You can change this to for example the IP of the analytics VM.
  • RW means that the export is created with read and write access.
  • Insecure means that clients can use non-reserved ports.
  • All_squash means that all users get mapped to the anonymous user account
  • anonuid=0 means that the anonymous user ID will get mapped to the user ID 0. Be careful since this is the root account!
  • anonguid=0 means that the anonymous group ID will get mapped to the group ID 0. Again, this is the root group!

If you did install your Solutions Enabler as a different user, make sure that you map the anonuid and anonguid to the respective numerical IDs, to allow access to the files we are going to export. Now, we simply restart the NFS server, or have it re-read its config should it already be online, using:

/etc/init.d/nfsserver restart

or

exportfs –ra

We can check if the export is working, using the following command:

showmount –e localhost

Now, we create a scheduled job to archive the Solutions Enabler file. To do that, add the following line to your crontab: 2-57/5 * * * * /opt/emc/SYMCLI/bin/stordaemon action storstpd -cmd archive This will cause the job start at 2 minutes past the hour, and run in 5 minute intervals. Check under /usr/emc/API/symapi/stp/ttp, to see if you have a new directory. Normally the directory should be the serial number of your storage array, and contain compressed files inside of that directory that contain the information the Symmetrix adapter will need. Final thing to do right now, is log on to the analytics VM, and create a folder where we will mount the required files. For example create a directory called /media/VMAX. Once you have created the directory, edit /etc/fstab to contain the following line: 10.10.10.10: /usr/emc/API/symapi/stp /media/VMAX nfs rw,lock 0 0 Make sure you change the IP address to match that of your Solutions Enabler host, and then mount the directory using the following command:

mount /media/VMAX

If you don’t have a firewall blocking communication, you should now be able to traverse the subdirectories and access the files. Finally, you can now configure the adapter, and input the directory you just mounted as the “EMC Symmetrix Main Input Folder”. So, in the text field, simply enter the following as the path:

/media/VMAX/ttp

If you test the adapter now, you should see it come back successfully, and after giving it a bit of time, start working with the data you are now importing from your VMAX/Symmetrix system. 🙂

GestaltIT, vCloud Director, Virtualization, VMware, VMworld, vSphere

VMworld 2012 – Call for voting and a jiffy?!

Bas Raayman

vote! by smallcaps, on FlickrThe Twitter world has been slightly abuzz. The reason? Well, a couple of weeks ago people were allowed to submit session proposals on VMworld.com. Basically, the call for papers is a way for folks to say “Hey, this is a cool idea for a session I have. This is what I would like to talk about.”. You submitted that on the site, and a first selection was made of the submissions, before they were now put online.

What do you need to do now? Well, you need to vote! If you go to VMworld.com you can click on the “Call for Papers Public Voting” link, and then cast a vote for the sessions you would like to see at VMworld. The only thing you need is a registered account at VMworld.com, and if you don’t have an account, you can create one here.

Once your are on the site, just browse through the sessions, and click on the thumb symbol in front of the session to cast your vote. It’s as easy as that, and you can vote for all the sessions that seem interesting to you (and others).

And while you are browsing, why not also take a quick look at session number 1665? This was submitted by my colleague Jonas Rosland and myself, and is titled:

Automagically Set-up Your Private Cloud Lab Environment: From Empty Box to Infrastructure as a Service in a Jiffy!

After casting your vote, it should look like this:

In the session, we will cover setting up a fully automated vCloud Director deployment in your lab environment. Starting off with an empty server and teaching you how to automate the installation of a full Cloud Infrastructure with ESXi, vCenter, vCloud Director and vApps, combined with the power of vCenter Orchestrator. And with all of this combined, you’ll be done in a jiffy!

If you think it would be interesting, we are both thankful for your vote! 🙂

General, Virtualization, VMware

vExpert 2012 – And the award goes to…..

Bas Raayman

A while ago, I created a post about the vExpert nominations for 2012.

Well, in the meantime people were nominated, or nominated themselves, and the resulting list of folks was posted here. And the number of vExperts has increased again, from 326 in 2011, to 390 at the time of writing, and the announcement states:

Due to the large number of applications, the list is still not complete, and we will be adding a couple dozen names to it over the next week or so. If you have not yet received an email from us, please have a little patience. We will make sure to let you know the results as soon as possible.

Which means that we will likely have over 400 vExperts this year. Pretty cool! And I’m happy and honored that I’m part of this group again. So, here’s a special thank you to John Troyer, Alex Meier and all of the folks part of the vExpert program. And also my congratulations to the folks who were awarded with the title, especially the new vExperts! 🙂

Clustering, EMC, Storage, Virtualization, VMware, VPLEX, vSphere

VMware HA demo using vMSC with EMC VPLEX Metro

Bas Raayman

That’s a mouth full of abbreviations for a title, isn’t it?

So, let me give you some background info. VMware introduced something called the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster, and Duncan Epping talks about this feature here.

What the vMSC allows us to do, is to create a regular stretched vSphere cluster, but now also stretch out the storage between the two clusters. This can be done in two ways (to quote from Duncan’s article):

I want to briefly explain the concept of a metro / stretched cluster, which can be carved up in to two different type of solutions. The first solution is where a synchronous copy of your datastore is available on the other site, this mirror copy will be read-only. In other words there is a read-write copy in Datacenter-A and a read-only copy in Datacenter-B. This means that your VMs in Datacenter-B located on this datastore will do I/O on Datacenter-A since the read-write copy of the datastore is in Datacenter-A. The second solution is which EMC calls “write anywhere”. In this case VMs always write locally. The key point here is that each of the LUNs / datastores has a “preferred site” defined, this is also sometimes referred to as “site bias”. In other words, if anything happens to the link in between then the storage system on the preferred site for a given datastore will be the only one left who can read-write access it.

The last scenario described here is something that obviously can cause some issues. EMC tried to address this by introducing the “independent 3rd party”, in form of the VPLEX Witness. Some documentation states that this witness should run in a 3rd site, but I would recommend to run this in a separate failure domain.

In essence, we have created the following setup:

© VMware

Awesome stuff, because we can do new things that weren’t quite possible before. Since VPLEX is one of the key storage virtualization solutions from EMC that allow us to perform an active/active disk access, we can perform a vMotion between the two sites, and due to the nature of VPLEX, we also perform a sort of storage vMotion on the underlying disks. That, without you having to shut down the VM to do both things at the same time. Pretty neat!

Now, as Chad describes here, a new disk connectivity state was introduced with vSphere 5, called “Permanent Device Loss” or PDL. This was a great feature to communicate to your infrastructure that a target was intentionally removed. You could unmount the disk, and remove the paths to your target in a proper way.

It was also useful to indicate an unexpected loss of your target, indicating that your cluster is in a partitioned state. The problem here was that a PDL state and VMware HA didn’t work so well together. When you had an APD notification, HA didn’t “kill” your VM, and your virtual machine would usually continue to respond to pings, but that was about it.

Then along came vSphere 5 Update 1, which allows us to set a flag on each of the hosts inside our cluster, and set a different flag for our HA cluster. Now, we can actually use HA and see terminate the VMs and have it restart the virtual machines on the hosts in our cluster that still have access to their datastores in their respective preferred sites.

I’ve created a short (ok, 8 minutes) video that show exactly this scenario. You’ll get a quick view of the VPLEX setup. You’ll see the Brocade switches that will change from a config with the normal full zoneset, being switched to a zoneset that will disable the inter-switch links between both VPLEX clusters. And you’ll see the settings inside of my vSphere lab setup, with the behavior of the hosts and virtual machines.

Since I’m quite new to creating videos like this, I hope the output is acceptable, and the video is clear enough. If you have any questions, feedback or would like to see more, please leave me a comment and I’ll see what I can do. 🙂

Just a quick modification to my post, since it wasn’t actually VM-HA (or VM monitoring) responding to the PDL event, but HA terminating the VM when running in to the PDL state, as Duncan pointed out to me on Twitter. Sorry for any confusion I may have caused!