Ravello

Testing VSAN 6.7 network outages on Ravello is easy!

May 1, 2018 Kim Bottu 2

For quite some time I have been thinking about setting up a new virtual VSAN lab on Ravello and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, aka.: OCI. There is not better time to get things done than the present, especially since vSphere 6.7 and VSAN 6.7 have been released earlier in the month. First: a big thank you to Ian Sanderson and Raff Poltronieri for posting to get vSphere 6.7 to work on Ravello / Oracle OCI. You can read about that right here. However, I was not really pleased with the network setup on my hosts. For starters, all my interfaces had been put on the same network, both the MGMT vmnics and the VSAN vmnics. I decided to change this. Starting today, […]

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 […]

How to configure different networks in Ravello – vEXPERT

October 7, 2017 Kim Bottu 1

Intro As a vEXPERT I am entitled to a cloud lab provided for by Ravello Systems. By default this lab has been setup on a specific network: 10.0.0.0/16. Until today I have been placing all my objects on my canvas on that same network. Below you can see an example of that. When I take a deeper look in the network configuration of Ravello I can see that the following has been pre-configured for my convenience: A switch: Switch 1 A router: Router 1: 10.0.0.2 A DNS server: 10.0.0.1 A DHCP server: 10.0.0.1 A DHCP range: 10.0.0.1 – 10.0.255.254 A Gateway: 10.0.0.2   FreeNAS –  double interfaces Today I finally took the time to make some changes. As an example […]