This morning I came across a link to vsphere-land.com regarding blog nominations for the top Virtualization (look at that, I spelt Virtualization with a “z”!) blogs of 2012 happening between 23/01 and 07/02. I missed out on the blog nominations for the list earlier on in January, but will still be voting of course. It will be a tough choice, as there are so many talented and deserving bloggers out there. My voting strategy will involve choosing five well known blogs that I enjoy reading and think deserve a vote, along with five other blogs that deserve more attention that what they get (in my opinion). I’ll try spread the votes out one by one, so that there is a good mix of points for both sets of blogs.
Best of luck to all the bloggers nominated! I see there are some nice TrainSignal VMware View and vSphere training DVDs up for grabs to voters, so make sure you get in there and cast your votes before the cut off time.
I have had a few people asking how I set up my Shared iSCSI storage for my own VMware Lab environment I run at home – the same lab I used to study for my VCP 4 and VCP 5 exams. So, I thought I would write up a blog post detailing how to go about setting this up and trying it out for yourself.
You have NFS shared storeage up and running for your ESXi hosts in your lab, but what about iSCSI? There are many different options out there. Here are a few I can think of off the top of my head:
FreeNAS VM
OpenFiler VM
HP P4000 Lefthand VSA trial
Hardware based – for example Iomega StorCenter IX2 series or QNAP NAS device
The last two options (hardware based are less feasible for a lab environment as you ideally don’t want to pay for something you will be testing. That being said, I was quite keen on the HP P4000 LeftHand VSA, as it offers the same kind of interface that you would use with the actual hardware version as well as some really cool enterprise-like features, such as clustering. In fact, as I understand, many businesses actually use the P4000 VSA in production – it was in the game before VMware came out with their own Virtual shared storage solution. Both of these solutions actually provide highly available shared storage for your ESXi hosts. Anyway, enough of the small talk – lets get on to setting up some shared iSCSI storage for our ESXi hosts to use for running Virtual Machines.
Deciding where to run your P4000 VSA VM
First of all download the trial of the HP P4000 LeftHand VSA. Once you are signed up for the free trial, you should get two options – one version for “Laptops” and one for “ESX”. Grab the relevant version – I chose to run my VSA VMs directly in VMware Workstation 8 and allowed my ESXi VMs access to their storage. If you want to run your VSAs as VMs on your ESXi host VMs then grab the “ESX” version. Once you have it downloaded, extract the download into a convenient location. I wanted my VSA to run on faster disks in my home system, so I moved the extracted files to an SSD volume. Remember to take this into consideration for your lab too – VMs will be running on this, so plan your lab VM deployment and storage carefully. Once ready, simply right-click the VSA.vmx configuration file and select “Open with VMware Workstation”. (Or add to Inventory if you are using the ESX version and browsing the VSA with your Datastore Browser).
Configuration
Now that we have the VSA VM inventoried, we need to create some additional virtual disks for it to use (by default it just has a disk used for it’s OS). Right-click the VM and add some disks. There is one important thing you should note here – the disks should be added on SCSI devices 1:0 and onwards. I added 3 x Virtual Disks to my VSA. Note that a storage total of more than 500GB will require your VSA VM to have more than 768 RAM). I chose 3 x 80GB Virtual disks, meaning I would get a RAID5 160GB volume at the end of this exercise. I found out the hard way (troubleshooting a VSA that would not work) that your VSA needs around 1GB or more of RAM if you have more than 500GB of storage on it! Keep this figure under 500GB and you can get away with the default 384MB RAM which is ideal for a home lab. So here are the details I used for each Virtual Disk added (a total of 3 of these):
New Virtual Disk
SCSI (Recommended)
Mode -> (Independent) -> Persistent
Enter size of disk – for e.g. 80GB
Thin provisioned (Leave “Allocate all disk space now” unticked) – to save disk space on those SSDs especially!
Store Virtual Disk as a Single File
Specify Virtual Disk filename
Important: If you didn’t get an option to specify the Virtual Device Node, go back to “Advanced” on each disk and change to device node x, where x is Virtual Device Node SCSI 1:1 to 1:3. (a different node for each disk you added). If you do not specify these selections, then the VSA will not detect your disks or be able to use them.
Remeber to use these Virtual Device Nodes for each disk added.
Once your disks are added, ensure it is on the right VM network (I used bridged in Workstation for my lab), your network situation will of course vary. Then power up the VSA. Whilst it is powering up, we’ll need to get the HP P4000 Centralized Management Console installed on a “management” PC. In your VSA download you should have also received the installer for this. Simply run the installer and go through the wizard to get this installed.
P4000 Centralized Management Console Installer
Back to your VSA console, you should now be at the login prompt – type Start to login, then press Enter at the “Login” screen. We’ll now be presented with a menu:
Navigate to Network TCP/IP Settings and choose your eth0 adapter. Configure a hostname for your VSA – in my example I used “blogvsa.noobs.local”. Don’t forget to set your VSA up to have a static IP address and enter your network details. If you have a DNS server, now would be a good time to also add an A Name Record for your VSA’s hostname and assign it the IP address you configured it with. Accept the network changes for the VSA and wait for it to apply the new settings.
Hostname and Network configuration.
Now launch your HP P4000 Centralized Management Console from the machine you installed it on, and we’ll begin setting this VSA up. Once open, you should have a few options to the left, and hopefully, the CMC would have already found your new VSA on the network. If not, don’t stress – just use the menu option Find -> Find Systems -> Find. Once the VSA is discovered, you can then close the “Find” window and view the VSA under Available Systems.
Expand Available Systems and locate your newly powered up VSA.
Next, we’ll create a new Management Group and add the VSA to it. The group will exist on this VSA as it is our only storage system. Right click on the VSA and choose Add to New Management Group. Give the group a suitable name, then click Next. The next screen asks us to create an Administrative user. Enter the details for a new admin account and then click Next. Specify NTP server settings, or set the time manually then click Next. Set up your DNS Server and Domain Name on the next screen, then click Next. If you have an SMTP server to use for email alerts, enter those settings on the next screen, or continue. To keep things simple, on the “Create Cluster” page, select the default “Standard Cluster” option, continue, give it a name, then click Next. The next screen requires you to specify a Virtual IP for Fault Tolerance or load-balanced iSCSI access. Add an IP and the correct subnet mask then click Next. The next screen allows us to create a volume. We have not set up our disks and RAID yet, so check the option to “Skip Volume Creation” and we’ll come back to that afterwards. Finish the wizard and wait for it to create the Management Group and configure everything for you. Once complete, it should auto-login to the Management Group using the admin user you specified for you. Review the summary once complete and close the wizard.
Now, expand out your Storage Cluster under the new Management Group and find your VSA system. Select Storage and then click the Disk Setup tab. We’ll now initialize each disk that we added to the VSA earlier and add it to the RAID group for the VSA. Right-click each uninitialized disk and select “Add Disk to RAID“.
Add each uninitialized VSA disk to the RAID group.
This post is getting a little long now, so I’ll end off this post here with our VSA configured, the Management Group and Cluster set up, and our disks initialized. In the next post [part 2/2], we’ll create a new Volume with these disks and will be setting up our iSCSI initiators from our ESXi hosts as “Servers” in the CMC. After this, we will present the new Volume to our ESXi hosts as an iSCSI LUN and create our VMFS shared storage for vSphere to use. Stay tuned, as part 2 will be coming soon! (Hopefully tomorrow!) See below for the next section:
Now and then I find that I need to retrieve some useful information from a variety of VMs, this usually involves me doing a Get-VM with some selections and criteria to search for. However sometimes the information I require about a VM is listed in the advanced configuration and not as easy to get to with a single cmdlet. I thought it would be really handy to have a PowerCLI function that would easily pull the useful information out for me and summarise it for any given VM or set of VMs.
With that said, I recently read a great blog post by Jonathan Medd (Basic VMware Cluster Compatibility Check), and after reading it I thought it would be a great idea to create a set of functions that provide me with the information I often use. To start, I thought I would do a function that lists the most useful or common information about VMs that I often search for. As well as speeding up the process of retrieving information about VMs, I thought it would also be good PS/PowerCLI practise for me to write more functions. The reason being that I often tend to do PowerCLI reporting scripts rather than actual functions that accept input from the pipeline or other parameters. Below is my function to collect some useful information about Virtual Machines – you can specify a VM with the -VM parameter or pipe a list of VMs to it, using Get-VM | Get-VMUsefulStats. Jonathan’s post also had an interesting section about the order in which output is displayed. You’ll need to pipe the output to Select-Object to change the order the information is fed back in, otherwise it will list the information in the default order. This is not really a problem anyway, just good to know if you are fussy about the order in which the output comes back in!)
So, here is the first function (Get-VMUsefulStats):
[download id=”7″]
function Get-VMUsefulStats {
<#
.SYNOPSIS
Fetches interesting or useful stats about VMware Virtual Machines
.DESCRIPTION
Fetches interesting or useful stats about VMware Virtual Machines
.PARAMETER VM
The Name of the Virtual Machine to fetch information about
.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-VMUsefulStats -VM FS01
.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-VM | Get-VMUsefulStats
.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-VM | Get-VMUsefulStats | Where {$_.Name -match "FS"}
.LINK
http://www.shogan.co.uk
.NOTES
Created by: Sean Duffy
Date: 18/01/2012
#>
[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage="Name of the VM to fetch stats about",
ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)]
[System.String]
$VMName
)
process {
$VM = Get-VM $VMName
$VMHardwareVersion = $VM.Version
$VMGuestOS = $VM.OSName
$VMvCPUCount = $VM.NumCpu
$VMMemShare = ($VM.ExtensionData.Config.ExtraConfig | Where {$_.Key -eq "sched.mem.pshare.enable"}).Value
$VMMemoryMB = $VM.MemoryMB
$VMMemReservation = $VM.ExtensionData.ResourceConfig.MemoryAllocation.Reservation
$VMUsedSpace = [Math]::Round($VM.UsedSpaceGB,2)
$VMProvisionedSpace = [Math]::Round($VM.ProvisionedSpaceGB,2)
$VMPowerState = $VM.PowerState
New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
Name = $VMName
HW = $VMHardwareVersion
VMGuestOS = $VMGuestOS
vCPUCount = $VMvCPUCount
MemoryMB = $VMMemoryMB
MemoryReservation = $VMMemReservation
MemSharing = $VMMemShare
UsedSpaceGB = $VMUsedSpace
ProvisionedGB = $VMProvisionedSpace
PowerState = $VMPowerState
}
}
}
You can use the cmdlet to very easily retrieve information about a single VM or list of VMs. Examples:
Get-VMUsefulStats -VM NOOBS-VC01
Get-VM | Get-VMUsefulStats
To format the output in a neat table, pipe the above to Format-Table (ft) like so:
Get-VM | Get-VMUsefulStats | ft
The “MemShare” value is interesting – it is something I was specifically interested in, as some VMs I have worked with in the past have needed memory sharing to be specifically disabled, and this is something that needs to be changed with an advanced parameter on the VM. Therefore most (default) VMs will not have this entry at all and will appear blank in the output. (the parameter I am referring to for those interested is sched.mem.pshare.enable). Of course this most likely won’t be of any use to you, so feel free to omit this bit from the function, or feel free to customise the function to return information useful to your VMware deployment VMs. Here is an example of the output for one VM.
Anyway, I hope someone finds this useful, and please do let me know if you think of any improvements or better way of achieving a certain result.
Today I passed my VCP 5 exam – a month before the cut off date for getting it done without the need to participate in the usual compulsory classroom training! (For those already holding the VCP 4 certification). It seems like just about everyone is doing one of these exam experience posts, so I thought I would join in and provide my feedback on the exam. I have also had a few people asking about how it went and for some advice on how best to study for the VCP 5 so hopefully this will be help to some. Parts of this post may be repeated information, but I will also detail my specific study routine below which will hopefully be helpful.
Whenever possible, I referred to the following two excellent VCP 5 study / advice pages – they are a great starting point and give a good overview of what you need to know and what you need to cover:
Next up, I got up to speed with the new VMware vSphere 5 features by doing the following:
Upgraded my home vSphere 4.1 lab environment to vSphere 5 – if you don’t already have a lab, I wrote a (fairly lengthy) article last year about creating one for yourself using VMware Workstation over at Simple-Talk – Read more here. There are various improvements that could be made to this lab environment article, such as using the newer Workstation 8.0, linked clones, and creating some of your VMs such as AD / vCenter within your nested ESXi VMs, so if you do take a look, keep this in mind and take a look else where for newer versions of Lab setups using vSphere 5.
TrainSignal VCP 5 DVD course – I got one of these ordered in and I watched the entire 17 hours set. Whilst some of it was repeated information for me – (working day in and day out with vSphere 4.x), there were still tons of new things I learnt and of course they cover all of the new vSphere 5 features in some fairly decent detail which was what I was primarily after! It was also good to get a refresher on vDS networking as I don’t use that too often in my day to day duties. Elias and David do a great job of explaining each feature and going through hands on installations / configurations.
Lab work – I tried out all of the new features (except Auto Deploy) in my upgraded vSphere 5 lab environment at home. I still need to set up Auto Deploy to try it out for myself, but the TrainSignal DVD covered that for me, and I also read up about it in the official VMware documentation.
Duncan Epping & Frank Denneman’s VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive book – I grabbed a copy on Kindle – this is a great resource to read up about the clustering features, and after reading through their “4.1 edition” whilst I was on holiday last year, I knew I was definitely going to be grabbing this latest refresh. I didn’t have time to read this through before my exam, but I did do a quick refresher on the new HA in vSphere 5 before the exam – it was very useful to know more about the inner workings of FDM and find out more about the new Master / Slave functionality of HA.
The important stuff that you need to know:
VCP 5 Blueprint – currently, the latest version of this document is 1.41 – I used this and made sure I was up to speed on every section by downloading and reading VMware documentation on each objective in the blueprint. I also read a few blogs who covered the objectives in the blueprint with summarised notes and these were helpful to recap with.
Practise questions / tests
Simon Long’s SLOG has some great practise questions to try out – I used these a couple of times to practise with – you won’t get these questions in the exam of course, but they are good to check that you know your stuff and practise with.
VMware Practise exam – this is the official VMware practise exam – I took it once I was happy I was pretty much up to speed with everything. The practise exam I took on the VMware site had 30 questions to do in around 45 minutes. Apparently if you get a full 100% you can’t take it again, so they recommend you purposely answer one question incorrectly to ensure you don’t throw away your chances of using it again. I did this the day before my exam to see how I was doing.
Final thoughts
Finally, I would agree with most other bloggers out there – the VCP 5 is a bit more challenging than the VCP 4 exam. I didn’t come across any configuration maximum questions myself, so this is good news, as I honestly thought they were a bit of a waste of time in the VCP 4 exam – they are simple facts that can easily be looked up in documentation – useful in some cases, but not in practise. The VCP 5 exam seemed to cover a good deal of troubleshooting scenarios which is what counts in my opinion, and seems more relevant! All in all, it was a challenging, yet satisfying exam!
Previously, using my home lab environment I had wondered how to check to see if my shared storage was using VAAI (VMware Storage APIs for Array Integration) – this is a technology that provides hardware acceleration functionality for your storage in vSphere, and was first introduced for vSphere ESX(i) 4.1. Essentially, this allows your hosts to offload certain virtual machine and storage management functions to hardware that supports VAAI.
The very first way I found I was able to see if VAAI was active on a datastore was by using ESXTOP. Silly – as it is quite a long-winded way of determining this, but it gave me an idea of whether it was in use or not. Anyway, to get to this ESXTOP view, go to your devices screen (press u) and remove a few columns that are taking up room (press F to add/remove columns), toggle all columns except the DEVICE name column, then add the counters we are interested in for VAAI. (press O – for VAAISTATS). Like so:
Now you can see the VAAI statistics for your datastores/devices in ESXTOP – notice how my HP/LHN P4000 VSA lab iSCSI datastores are showing VAAI stats as expected, whereas my shared NFS Datastores from a FreeNAS appliance are blanked out / not supported in the screenshot below:
Here is a useful list of ESXTOP counters that are explained in detail if you are wondering what each of these shows exactly: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11812 – Section 4.2.9 shows ZERO statistics specifically, which is one of the features VAAI can help hosts offload to hardware.
So now, for a slightly easier / clearer way of viewing whether VAAI is active or not – we can use esxcli!
Connect up to an ESXi 5 host using SSH or the DCUI and issue the following command (Where the device identifier is specified after -d) – remember to find the device identifier applicable to the device you want to check for VAAI status on – one way of doing this is to identify the datastore using your vSphere client – Hosts & Clusters view -> Select ESXi host -> Configuration -> Storage -> Devices View tab -> Look for device identifier in the name column. Once you have your device ID, issue the command below:
esxcli storage core device list -d naa.6000eb3afd81276200000000000000bd
You will get a list out of the device along with various settings and feature statuses. We are specifically looking for “VAAI Status” – if it is enabled, we will see “VAAI Status: enabled” as in the example below.
Brian Ragazzi has also showed an even easier method (thanks Brian!) to get a list of devices along with their VAAI feature support listed using:
esxcli storage core device vaai status get
using “esxcli storage core device vaai status get” to get VAAI status for devices
Interestingly, whilst researching this, I came across a blog post by Jason Langer who also explains the first method I showed above of checking VAAI status – in his case he was using Netapp storage and found some other interesting caveats along the way in terms of getting VAAI enabled on his hosts with his particular device. Well, I hope this post helps and as always, if you spot anything out of place – feel free to chime in on the comments section!
