NUMA and Cluster-On-Die

NUMA implementation has gone through several phases of Development in vSphere. At first, it was only responsible for initial placement of VMs, then its functionality was extended with dynamic balancing. In vSphere 5 VMware has presented support of Wide-VMs by exposing NUMA architecture to virtual machines.

New CPUs have presented additional feature - Cluster-on-Die - of splitting physical CPU sockets into  NUMA domains. 

The Full article can be read here

C# Client is dead, long live the Web Client

Yep, C# client will no longer be available in the next releases of vSphere.

VMware have been giving a pretty clear signals in the last major vSphere releases that C# client would be gone soon, but nobody knew when exactly it was going to happen. However, when SRM and VUM were moved to web client in vSphere 6 it was obvious C# client's days are numbered.

Probably it could have been done a couple of years ago, but first Web client wasn't good enough due to performance issues. It also lacked integration with other VMware solutions and there was no replacement of C# client for standalone ESXi hosts.

Today VMware have moved its plugins (SRM, VUM) to the Web client and other VMware partners are sailing in the same direction. It also presented new embedded HTML5 Host client for ESXi hosts, which has feature parity with C# client for standalone hosts.

Here are some of web client benefits compared to C# client:

• Scalability – WC handles more objects and more concurrent admin access
• Bookmarking URLs - WC allows you to quickly return to specific objects or views and share them with others (such as in a support ticket)
• Recent Objects - WC lets you navigate quickly between things you’re working on
• Work-In-Progress - WC lets you save your work and come back to it later, even from another computer!
• Enhanced Linked Mode – WC can call up all your inventory in one view
• Remembers user customizations to UI – WC enables column selections and widths on grids, portlets on summary pages
• Latest feature support – WC is the only interface to support all new features 

As a short-term goal I think VMware will be focusing on fixing Client Integration Plugin which causes most of the issues with Web client - people having issues with OVF import, browsing datastores. It also doesn't work on Mac.

The long term goal would be to have a single ultimate client for vSphere and ESXi hosts. That's what actually VMware is doing right now by trying to replace Flash Web client with HTML5. You can already have a preview of H5 Web Client for vSphere - it exists as a Fling.

It has to be noted that The C# client will be kept in all current platforms.

You can read the official announcement here and that's where you can leave your feedback. 

VMware Virtual SAN Network Design Guide v2.0 is just released

VMware has just released the document that covers network aspects of Virtual SAN design. 

Actually, the guide has been re-released as there was v1.0 before (hence the new one goes under v2.0), but as far as I am aware it was removed from the VMware web site due to some inaccuracies in it. So for a while people lacked validated design information on one of the key aspect of VSAN setup. I remember there were quite a few discussions on how to provide network redundancy and load-balancing for VSAN traffic and nobody could get a formal answer.

The guide is very comprehensive and even provides mutlicast configuration examples on Cisco and Brocade switches.

You can check the guide here

Check out the new VSAN 6.2 Hands-On-Lab

VMware has just released new "HOL-SDC-1608 What's New with Virtual SAN 6.2" Hands-On-Lab

It covers all new functionality the VMware brought in new VSAN 6.2, e.g. compression and deduplication on AF, new SPBM settings, new ESXCLI VSAN namespace, etc.

However, the HOL assumes you have basic knowledge of VSAN. For instance, networking design isn't covered here. 

Interestingly, the networking configuration in this HOL still contains 2  VSAN VMK interfaces whereas generally it is recommended to have only 1 VMK and provide HA by NIC teaming and Load Balancing with LACP.

Even though I have VSAN 6.2 deployed in my home lab I still skimmed through the VSAN 6.2 HOL and I can tell it is pretty useful as I have learnt something new.

You can find it here - VSAN 6.2 HOL

Migration from Windows vCenter 5.5 to vCenter Server Appliance 6.2 - Part 3 - Upgrade ESXi hosts with ESXCLI

My servers have ILO , but that's not working good as it is based on Java - all kinds of problems with java in browsers, especially on Mac. So I usually avoid using it even though I pretty often used it before to mount ISO on servers over the network for ESXi installation and upgrade.

Given my issues with ILO I opted for an easier upgrade option - using powerful esxcli command
1. Upload image to the datastore


2. Check the profiles list in your depot file




3. You can check the each profile's details

That will show you the VIBs it includes and even the corresponding KB



4. Once you choose required profile just run the following command




As you can see the host was upgraded successfully, but it has to be restarted.

How to deploy VSAN 6.2 Witness Virtual Appliance to VMware Fusion 8.1

Since I moved to vSphere 6 U2 I started to plan my VSAN deployment. The problem I have is that there are only two physical servers in my home lab and I have no physical server to host VSAN Witness appliance. I am trying to make it run on my Synology DS415+ (crazy, but seems to be doable), but I need to upgrade RAM on Synology first.

As a temp solution I thought I could run VSAN 6.2 Witness on my Mac. William Lam has already posted a great post on how to Deploy and Run VSAN 6.1 Witness in VMware Workstation/Fusion, but I faced a small issue when following it. 

First it warned me that there is OVF specification and hardware compliance mismatch.  

And after that it failed to proceed with error "Line 821: Unexpected element 'Propery'"

Line 821 referred to the line we have to adjust in Step 3 as per William's guideline. I don't really know whether OVF file for VSAN 6.1 Witness was different or it is a newer version of VMware Fusion that can't parse the OVF file, but here is what I did to make it work. 

Just a small note - all credits for the following procedure go to William Lam. I only adjusted a couple of steps in his procedure to make it work for VSAN 6.2 Virtual Witness Appliance running in VMware Fusion 8.1.

1. Extract content of the OVA file using VMware OVF tool.

/Applications/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/ovftool VMware-VirtualSAN-Witness-6.0.0.update02-3620759.ova VMware-VirtualSAN-Witness-6.0.0.update02-3620759.ovf

2. Create a copy of OVF file in case something goes wrong. It is a quicker option than extracting OVA content again

3. Open OVF (you can even use default textEdit utility) and adjust the appliance size by moving the text marked in Red

<Configuration off:default="true" off:id="normal">

to the following string

<Configuration off:default="true" off:id="tiny">

3. Go to line 821 and delete the following text - marked in the screenshot

Btw, even though textEdit doesn't show line numbers you can still press Cmd+L and type the line number you want to go to. 

You can save and close OVF file now.

4. Create new SHA1 checksum for updated OVF file

openssl sha1 VMware-VirtualSAN-Witness-6.0.0.update02-3620759.ovf

5. Update the OVF file checksum in manifest file

6. Now you can import VSAN 6.2 Witness, but don't press Finish yet.

7. Get to the VM's locations and open the package to get to the .VMX file

8. Open the .VMX file - again, textEdit works just fine, add the following code and replace the password

guestinfo.ovfEnv = "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><Environment xmlns='http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/environment/1' xmlns:oe='http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/environment/1'><PropertySection><Property oe:key='vsan.witness.root.passwd' oe:value='Password123'/></PropertySection></Environment>"

9. Once you save the file you can run the Witness Appliance.

Migration from Windows vCenter 5.5 to vCenter Server Appliance 6.2 - Part 4 - Moving to external PSC

We got to the last step of our short journey. In this post I will be deploying new PSC appliance and then will reconfigure my vCSA to use external PSC instead of embedded once. 
For the lab of my size Embedded PSC is a preferable option, however I am going to deploy another vCSA and a couple of nested ESXi servers later to be able to test more interestings scenarios in the lab. And for that I will need my vCSA to use External PSC.

1. Create a DNS A record for new PSC.

That's an official prerequisite when deploying new PSC or vCSA. Without DNS record the installation process will fail. 

2. Deploy new PSC

2. Select Datacenter

3. Choose Deployment option - link to PSC Descision tree

Btw, there is a great PSC Deployment decision tree which helps you to decide on the best PSC deployment option 

4. Join to existing SSO domain

5. Choose Site

6. PSC comes in one size only

7. Select the datastore for PSC

8. Configure Networking

9. Review Summary and Click Finish

10. SSH to the new appliance and check the replication status

You don't really want to repoint you vCSA to external PSC that failed to replicate current configuration from the embedded PSC or has some issues with services health 

11. Check the new PSC status in the Web client

12. Join new PSC to the domain 

I almost overlooked this aspect, but I accidentaly remembered that I had read something about it in William Lam's blog

13. Repoint vCenter to new external PSC 

and we are done here. The goal is achieved. 

Now I can get to configure and test new VSAN 6.2 and plenty of other new features of vSphere 6.