VSAN

RAVELLO: Troubleshooting VSAN Network connectivity issues

March 28, 2018 Kim Bottu 0

Yesterday night, I was setting up a new VSAN cluster on Ravello and got hit with a network issue: Apparently my network was partitioned!   The network for all hosts has been setup similarly on all hosts, so the network partition issue didn’t make much sense. MGMT Kernel: MGMT and vMotion traffic vmk0 10.1.0.1x VSAN Kernel: VSAN traffic vmk1 10.1.0.2x Unfortunately esxi004.vmusketeers.local had been added to a separate partition! Rather than checking each host separately, I used the VSAN PowerCLI commands to figure out if my hosts were properly configured for VSAN networking. PS C:\Windows\system32> $vsanhealth.networkhealth HostResult : {VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl, VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl, VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl, VMware.VimAutomation.Storage.Impl.V1.Vsan.Health.VsanHostNetworkHealthResultImpl} HostCommunicationFailure : HostDisconnected : HostInEsxMaintenanceMode : HostInVsanMaintenanceMode : HostWithVsanDisabled : IssueFound : True LargePingTestSuccess : False MatchingIPSubnets : True MatchingMulticastConfig […]

Rebuilding your VSAN lab in Ravello is easy and takes no time!

February 1, 2018 Kim Bottu 2

I really like the Free vEXPERT Ravello tier to run some quick tests but it has few disadvantages: The limited amount of CPU hours. The time it takes to upload images, create VMs, blueprints, applications and networks. The time it takes to create a new lab environment from scratch can take a lot of hours. The more servers you add to your lab environment, the longer it will take to create it. But as soon as I had figured out how to create my applications, VMs and blueprints, it was very easy to come up with a plan to deploy new test environments in different regions or to replace my corrupted labs with only a few mouse clicks. The time to deploy a […]

RAVELLO: Windows vCenter 6.5 vCenter server errors: 500, 503

December 20, 2017 Kim Bottu 3

If you use a cleanly installed Windows based vCenter server in the #VEXPERT FREE TIER of RAVELLO cloud you might have seen the following errors as well. For me there errors were the cause that my VSAN lab would not properly work anymore, so I had to find a solution fast. I assume these errors appear because in the Free Tier,  Ravello isn’t always the fastest environment to start up your server nor to run your workloads. So some services might be timing out while starting up. This will result in a handful of vCenter services not being reachable and an unreachable management plane.  Yes this also applies to a Windows based vCenter server  with an embedded PSC. A server error occurred. [500] […]

How to setup a VSAN 6.6.1 test environment on Ravello

October 30, 2017 Kim Bottu 1

There are a couple of things to prepare before you can start setting up your VSAN 6.6.1 test on Ravello Cloud. If you don’t have an account, you can click on the picture below which will redirect you to the Oracle cloud signup page (Ravello is owned by Oracle). After signing up you will receive 30 days of free access and a budget of 300$ to spend as you wish. Images For this VSAN 6.6.1 test, I have uploaded the following files to Ravello: Server 2012 STD iso file VMware-VIM-all-6.5.0-6816762.iso VMware-VMvisor-Installer-6.5.0.update01-5969303.x86_64.iso   Create a new application in Ravello In this application you will create all the VM’s you need for this test. Click on create application give it a name and […]

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Lets Talk About Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr #Sexigraf #Monitoring #vExpert

October 9, 2017 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I went to my first VMUG recently and it was great! I met plenty of new people and learned a lot of new things. I got in a few discussions about monitoring and I mentioned that I was pretty fond of Sexigraf @Sexigraf_fr . I found it interesting that a few people had never heard of this great FREE product. I mean monitoring is important, whether you want to know what your cluster utilisation is or how your datastore latency is or how your VSAN cluster is doing. Keeping stats for a period of time is also important because you want to be able to monitor trends etc. There are plenty of products out there that can help you […]

Journey to VCIX-NV – Intro

July 23, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

This is my series regarding my journey towards VCIX-NV. This series is not about giving you a full hands-on guide for the exam as many have already done this well, but this is only about adding more remarks about the lab issues and other useful resources. For those who don’t know VCIX-NV is a practical-lab certification for VMware NSX. To be able to pass the exam you will need a home-lab or some old servers at work which have been setup with vSphere and NSX so you can get your hands dirty. This is just an introduction I will list my used resources, my home lab configuration and a short description of what my virtual lab is gonna be like. Used Resources: VMware […]

Bootstrap a Single-node VSAN Cluster under Running vCenter Server

July 23, 2016 Shady ElMalatawey 0

In my NSX Lab, I needed a single-node cluster with VSAN enabled beside another normal cluster with three nodes. William Lam has a genius post about how to bootstrap a single-node VSAN cluster to add your vCenter on it in your lab, but unfortunately even though his advice works perfectly when you have a single ESXi host, it does not work well when you already have a vCenter in place. My story begins from the VSAN Default Storage Policy. This policy enforces that a deployment of VMs needs to have: Failures to Tolerate set to 1 (FTT =1 ): That means that the minimum number of nodes has to be 3 nodes and each VM disk has to be configured in RAID-1. Number of disk stripes=1: […]

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REVIEW: Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) 2nd Edition

June 6, 2016 Kim Bottu 1

On Friday my pre-order of Duncan Epping’s and Cormac Hogan’s updated book for VSAN was finally available for download. A few clicks on the website of PearsonITcertification and I was ready to start reading. I took the whole weekend to read this book. The structure of the book: The books reads very pleasantly mostly because it has been well structured, and despite the technical nature of the content of this book (of course this is why we buy it), it is easy to follow. ‘Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) 2nd Edition’ contains ten chapters: Introduction to VSAN VSAN Prerequisites and Requirements for Deployment VSAN Installation and Configuration VM Storage Policies on VSAN Architectural Details VM Storage Policies and Virtual Machine Provisioning Management and Maintenance Stretched Cluster Designing […]