Esxi

Using the VCP As of the last part in the series we have a fully up and running k8s cluster with the vSphere Cloud Provider installed! Let’s make sure it works and is provisioning storage for us by deploying a StorageClass and a test app. Prerequisites Tools I am using macOS, so will be using the brew package manager to install and manage my tools, if you are using Linux or Windows, use the appropriate install guide for each tool, according to your OS....

After deploying a vSAN cluster, the need sometimes arises to make changes to its network configuration, such as migrating the vmkernel network of the cluster to a new subnet. This requirement may appear for example when changing the network in which the vSAN cluster is running, or even, in a more complex scenario such as when a standalone vSAN needs to be converted to a stretched cluster. In these sorts of situations, complications may be encountered if the subnet in use for the vSAN vmkernel ports cannot be routed to the network as a whole, as it is in use elsewhere in the organization, and is currently isolated in an L2 segment....

Following on from my previous post on configuring custom ESXi images for PXE deployment, it piqued my interest again in Auto Deploy, now that I have a lab large enough (enough physical failure domains) to justify auto-deploy I figured i’d give it another go. I have chosen to implement stateless caching as it will allow the hosts to boot from the last used ESXi image they had if the PxE/AutoDeploy server goes down - then when it comes back up will pull the new version, this accounts for a total infrastructure outage and still allows the hosts to be bootable....

Introduction I have recently been working on a larger scale platform for my employer, it requires quick deployments of environments on VSAN with some standardised VIBs added in, initially we were doing this with a standard ESXi ISO install through iDRAC and then installing vCenter, vSphere Update Manager and pushing the VIBs to the hosts via that. This is clearly a sub-optimal process and given our dedicated lab environment, we wanted to be able to spin up/down environments a bit more quickly - so we looked to optimising the install process and making production ready as the first step (as most people know, VSAN has some stringent HCL requirements when it comes to drivers and firmware)....

I have been testing out Runecast Analyzer ↗ in my lab recently - it’s pretty badass, you can set it up to scan your virtual infrastructure at a vCenter level and will scan your vC, VMs and hosts looking for KBs that may apply, security compliance and best practises. As you can see my lab isn’t exactly a model config when it comes to any of these things: It’s really very cool, syslogging is also built in, if you add it as a syslog target to your hosts (RCA can do this automatically too) it will monitor the syslogs incoming and search the KB database for any matching problems - I actually found that some of my iSCSI paths weren’t coming up after failover due to this!...

I found myself in the position recently whereby I had two hosts I bought off eBay (as one does for labs), they arrived, I had great plans… But no iDRAC Enterprise :( While the iDRAC Ent cards were on their way to me I couldn’t help but want to install ESXi on these things so they were ready to go (old Dell R610s are seriously good value now). One slight problem....

I have been working with VSAN in the lab recently and had the need to get some deeper stats on the inner operations. I had upgraded the lab to ESXi 6.0 U1 and vCenter 6.0 U1 and for the life of me couldn’t get the RVC console in the VCSA to work per the VMware KB ↗. In particular it just wouldn’t log in with this line, even with the correct password:...

If you’ve been reading my other posts of late, you will have gathered I’ve been building a new lab. I say “new”, the last one was a single R710 with a ReadyNas Ultra 6 attached. So essentially, this is my first REAL lab. It’s mostly based on Dell hardware; it’s cheap on eBay, I like their management tools and in the past i’ve only really had good experiences with them, granted it’s no Cisco UCS, HP Bladesystem or Dell M1000e - I think with the addition of OpenManage, and in particular OMIVV it makes it almost as manageable as those environments when you get the foundations laid down nice and solid....

I recently rebuilt my lab and added 2x new ESXi hosts, I re-used my old single host in the process which I upgraded from ESXi 5.5 to 6.0 and patched to the same level as the new hosts. Everything was working as expected until it came for the time to enable HA. My old host claimed the master roll and thus the other boxes had to connect to it as slaves, however, these failed with “HA Agent Unreachable” and “Operation Timed Out” errors....

I have come across a number of environments where mystery “snapshot” files exist - they are not seen in snapshot manager, running a consolidation them doesn’t help, creating a snapshot (with memory, or guest OS quiescing) then running “Delete All” doesn’t resolve it, but some applications still think a snapshot is there. To take care of these is quite a manual process after you have followed all the VMware KB advice:...