vSAN Archives - HCIdiver

Using the new GUI for SmartFabric VxRail Deployment

In the last SmartFabric blog I covered how to enable SmartFabric on your Dell OS10 switch and to declare the personality. Building out a new SmartFabric VxRail cluster from a greenfield install requires two Top of Rack switches with the Leaf personality. Once this task is done, simply rebooting the ToRs will give you access to the GUI where everything required to setup the new fabric is achieved. This could not be simpler.

Login to SmartFabric VxRail Master

In the last step of the previous blog we setup the ICL ports between the Leafs and triggered an election by rebooting them. Now we need to logon to the Master switch of the new Leaf pair. If you hit the wrong one, you will be presented with the view below and know you are on the secondary. Just click the link on the ip address to reach the Master.

We can logon to the SmartFabric VxRail master by the default username/password of admin/admin. Here we are presented with the dashboard. There are two required steps to perform here.

Complete Fabric Setup

We can already see that the two Leaf switches have begun the initial fabric creation. The new topology shows the ICL connections. The first required step before we deploy SmartFabric VxRail is to Update Default Fabric Switch Names and Descriptions.

The second required step is to configure Uplinks. You have choice to setup Layer 2 or Layer 3 uplinks here. This can be changed later, but required for the VxRail deployment so you can reach DNS and NTP services normally. Add the Management network on the last step to reach these services outside of the VxRail rack.

Optional Settings

You are ready to deploy VxRail at this stage unless you require a few optional steps. You might need to make a few changes if your setup falls outside the default port speeds for example.

Configure Breakouts

You can change the uplinks speed from the default port speed (100GB). There are several options available depending on the switch you choose and the port you end up using. You might also need to adjust the Jump port speed if you plan to use a 1GB laptop nic in a 25GB switch.

Configure Jump Port

The jump port is used to deploy VxRail by using a laptop to reach the default client control vlan where VxRail Manager is setup initially. The Jump port can now be selected on any port. This is much better than the last version that always selected port 0 as the default jump port.

Deploy VxRail on SmartFabric

You can now deploy your first VxRail cluster into the SmartFabric enabled fabric. There will be one new step in the VxRail Manager deployment GUI. Once you confirm that you want to allow VxRail Manager to control the switch configuration, the rest of the setup is totally automated!

VSAN Disk Group Validation Error in VxRail

Disk Group Validation “Host with all-flash disk types is not compatible with existing hybrid cluster”

I ran into an issue recently when I was building a new VxRail cluster that I had just re-imaged using the RASR process. The RASR tool is used by Partners and Services to automate the process of wiping a node back to factory default settings. The node I was using was an All-Flash node. I was adding it into an All-Flash cluster. I was perplexed when a validation error popped up during the node add process. Validation Errors. Disk group validation. Host with all-flash disk types is not compatible with existing hybrid cluster.

VxRail hosts validation errors disk group validation

Check if the RASR iso is still attached.

I had a flashback to a previous error I encountered with the RASR ISO. I was trying to build a new cluster with 3 nodes. One of the nodes needed to be reset to factory default. I used the RASR ISO by attaching it as bootable media through the iDRAC console. When the reset finished, I accidentally left the RASR ISO still attached as virtual media to the iDRAC. When VxRail manager tried to validate the 3 nodes, it picked up the RASR’d node as hybrid not all-flash. This prevented the validation from passing since the first 3 nodes in a VxRail cluster need to be identical.

Check the ESXi console; Is SSD: True?

So I logged on to the iDRAC and checked the virtual media for an attached ISO. It wasn’t showing up this time. I decided to just take a quick look at the ESXi console to see if the disks were incorrectly detected as spinning.

esxcli vsan storage list

This will report back all the disks available for VxRail to configure for VSAN. The disks were all correctly reported as SSD. I was stumped. Something was causing the mis-alignment.

I had a bit of a brainwave. I had recently tested a custom RASR iso from the dev team that had a kixstart configuration. This ISO was a hands-off automated way of re-imaging the nodes from a batch file. It saved me a lot of manual steps by using an answer file for various prompts. I wonder was it somehow still mapped to the node?

I logged in to the iDRAC web interface and checked the “Attached Media” tab. There it was, still connected. Once I disconnected the RASR iso here the validation process passed. Huzzah!

Kubernetes and Kommunity!

Ireland VMware User Group: Kubernetes, k8s, Kubernetes!

I will give you three guesses what the September Ireland VMware User Group meeting in Dublin was all about. The VMUG event was packed with updates on Kubernetes, vSphere, and VMworld. It was standing room only from the start. The VMUG organizers moved everyone to a bigger room after the first session! Cormac Hogan began his own session by reminding everyone that VMUG is all about the community, all about the users. He would rather see end-users on the VMUG stage presenting how they used VMware solutions to solve problems, rather than only vendors sales pitches. All of the VMware presenters sessions were excellent, but i have to agree, the best session of the day came from the vCommunity.

VMUG is about vCommunity

The VMUG community session was presented by two community members from AIB. It was the last session of the day and the room was still full. The presenter from AIB asked the room, “How many of you look after infrastructure?”. I think almost every hand in the room shot up. This was in contrast to an earlier VMware presenter that had asked, “How many people are using Kubernetes?”. Very few hands went up that time. The presenter acknowledged Kubernetes was like teenage sex, it seems like a lot of people are talking about it but few are implementing it. Yet!

The presenter from AIB went on to describe how they had considered many different vendors and solutions on their digital transformation journey. AIB needed a new modern infrastructure strategy that worked for both Developers and Operators. They would need to maintain legacy applications they had and be able to pivot to new app development methods. They had decided that HCI was the answer for their infrastructure and they choose VxRack powered by VxRail. The best part of the session covered how they sold this new vision back to the business and were able to convince the board to make the new investment needed. It was very interesting to see how a business oriented session drew as much engagement as technology deep-dive one.

@edhoppitt says #RunAllTheThings

Ed Hoppitt from VMware kicked off the opening keynote. Ed works on the Modern Apss & Cloud Native Platforms team. He began by talking about innovation and how companies need different skillsets to innovate. He detailed the Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners concept very well. I had read about this originally from the great Simon Wardley.

consistent infrastructure vS[here VMware

Ed had an excellent one-slide that illustrated how VMware is enabling customers Digital Transformation journey from traditional to cloud native applications. The slide described how vSphere and Consistent Infrastructure could cover everything from traditional to micro-services and cloud native. Ed talked about how a UK Finance company was using multi-cloud to satisfy governance rules. They needed to leverage multiple clouds and be able to shift from one cloud to another in less than 30 days. This is the true multi-cloud nirvana and a really great use case.

VMworld 2019 Recap by @rsudding

Project Pacific and VMware Tanzu — Build ! Run! Manage!

Ryan Sudding from Vmware was up next. He is a regular Ireland VMware User Group advocate and supporter. Ryan had the mammoth task of breaking down everything that was announced at VMworld in San Francisco. Ryan talked about VMware’s strategy to transform how customers Build, Run and Manage software on Kubernetes. He talked about the new acquisitions that complement this strategy including Bitnami, Pivotal and Heptio and the announcements around Project Pacific and Tanzu.

At VMUG if you aren’t networking your doing it wrong.

At the break I got the chance to sit down with Cormac Hogan for lunch. We were joined by Jason Pearse and Dean Lewis from VMware. We are all in the Dell Technologies family now so its great to chat about what is going on in VMware and Dell EMC. Dean is active on twitter and has an excellent blog running here. The conversation at lunch was really all about Project Pacific, Kubernetes, and VCF on VxRail. The future is bright! I also met up with Rob from Asystec as well as a friend I had not met up with my Y2K IT days. Small world, small vCommunity.

@CormacJHogan vSAN and Kubernetes

Cormac Hogan continued the trend of the day by talking about Kubernetes in his session. Cormac is a well known speaker and expert on vSAN. He started by covering the What’s New in VSAN 6.7u3. This included new features for Enhanced Performance, Intelligent Operations and Unified Management. The second part of the session was a high-level explanation of using vSAN as persistent storage for Kubernetes. He pointed out that everything in his session can be accessed on Storage Hub which is a great resource.

Cormac continued to give an update on vSphere Cloud Native Storage (CNS). He was sporting a CNS t-shirt therefore he must know his stuff. The content of this session is covered here in a blog. He finished up with a demo of CNS and briefly covered vSAN Native File Services. Cormac asked the audience what protocols they would like to see made available for vNFS next. The audience answers fell roughly inline with expectaions; NFS v3 then SMB followed by S3.

@opowero Kubernetes: Smooth Operators

Olive Power worked formerly at Heptio and now works at VMware. She presented the last session which was titled Smooth Operators: A rough guide to Kubernetes Operators. Olive blogs a bit about Kubernetes and Operators here. Olives session covered why we use Kubernetes; to reduce complexity, shorten release and test cycles. This is done by breaking up monolithic application architectures into micro-services and requires different/better tooling. The role of Kubernetes is to maintain the desired state. That way it can be self-healing for Containers and Applications running on K8s. Olive explained how Kubernetes is extensible and the role that Operators have on making it easier to deploy applications. She referenced a couple places to learn more about this topic: Awesome Operators and OperatorHub.io.

The best HCI appliance just got better. Introducing ACE

VxRail had an ACE up its sleeve: Data.

Every day data is generated on the health, performance and consumption of customers VxRail VSAN clusters. This data can be sent back to Dell Technologies using Secure Remote Support (SRS) and customers benefit from an improved support experience. SRS can be used to send a heartbeat and create automated alerts and to allow remote access when needed. The VxRail team store this telemetry info in a support cloud and built a platform to run analytics against this rich data set. This gives support the ability to see common issues across different customers configurations. They have now enabled a front end interface to this data lake called ACE (Analytical Consulting Engine). ACE allows customers access to their own hci appliance data including CPU, memory, storage and VM details.

ACE for existing customers no extra cost

The first phase of the ACE project comes for free to existing VxRail customers. So if you are already using SRS and sending heartbeat data home then you just need access to login to the VxRail portal. Enabling SRS is really easy using a virtual appliance and your Dell EMC support account logon and Site ID. If you didn’t deploy this initially, I highly recommend installing it now. It takes no time at all.

ACE global dashboard for all sites

What if you have multiple sites with multiple clusters? The ACE dashboard provides a simple interface to view all your sites and clusters easily at a glance. Drill down from location to Cluster to individual nodes and VMs. Customers have loved the VxRail appliance experience. Some of the largest customers have said they only thing they have been missing is a VxRail manager of managers. In future, ACE will be the answer for them.

Cluster health scores made simple

ACE uses the data collected from SRS and continually monitors the health of a customers cluster. ACE will present a health score that is easy to understand at a glance. “VxRail ACE provides a health score for you entire HCI appliance stack. Allowing you to proactively address trouble spots that may affect delivery of services. Customers can efficiently scale their HCI based on the projected growth of IT needs.” You can learn more about ACE capability in this overview here, and also find instructions on how to get connected.

How do you polish a diamond?

The VxRail team have been on an amazing tear for the last few years. They have listened to customer need and are releasing new features on a regular cadence to improve upon an already great solution. The team have stayed clearly focused on making VxRail the only appliance for VMware VSAN the best experience for customers. They did it by offering a solution to offload from infrastructure teams as much work as a any customer will allow them. Tasks like configuration, sizing, deployment as well as day 2 ops including automated full stack patching are handled by the appliance now. This reduces risks and allows those infrastructure teams to focus their energies around projects the business wants and needs. No one ever gets a pat on the back for managing infrastructure!

Where can you see ACE and learn more?

I was lucky to get to meet some of the ACE product team in Vegas at Dell Technologies World this year. I learned about the current technology and the future exciting roadmap for ACE right there at the Meet The Experts zone. As soon as I got back home to the Customer Solution Center I made sure to get my VxRail HCI appliance configured and setup for customers to test drive. As new features are added to the platform we will be able to show off the capability immediately.

VxRail as a building block for VxRack SDDC

I have been interested in the evolution of software defined solutions for the last few years especially anything that makes it easier for customers to quickly deploy hardware, hypervisor, storage, and virtualization. Post Dell Technologies merger I was quick to raise my hand and volunteer to learn about the VxRail appliance. It makes sense to me to have an appliance form factor for the Data Center – where the engineering , testing and validation effort is done by the Dell EMC side, rather than by customers – this is about Time-to-Value for sure. The beauty of the VxRail appliance is the small starting point, ability to scale and the BYONetwork flexibility. Although I wasn’t ever involved in the VxRack turnkey offerings from EMC pre-merger, this also interested me for larger customers who were interested in rack-scale solutions. I was always curious how Dell EMC would evolve these two use cases aimed at similar customers. Both are looking for a quicker outcome, simplified deployment, scale out and always key is how day 2 operations can be made simple, risk free and still happen fast – helping customers to keep up with the pace of change!

I decided to try and deploy the turnkey stack for the software defined data center; VxRack SDDC which is based on VMware technology. It has vSphere, vSAN and NSX built in with a simplified (automated) deployment and a validated and tested configuration with validated, tested bundles for LifeCycle management covering the entire (hardware & software) stack.

I have a small lab with different VxRail nodes from our portfolio. I had heard that as the VxRack solution evolved, they would eventually be supporting Cisco and Dell switches as well as VxRail nodes. This is a pretty exciting development – and makes sense from a Sales, Support, Services pint of view… one building block that is highly engineered by our Dell, VMware and EMC engineering teams to deliver an excellent turnkey experience for our customers. Talk about hitting the ground running and not needing to reinvent the wheel. VxRail has been hugely successful for customers and now this would be the building block for rack scale.

I got a chance in my lab to deploy VxRack using VxRail nodes – and I wanted to capture my notes and experience. The first thing I should caveat is that this not a DIY solution. VxRack is fully engineered in factory. So my notes are more about my experience, not a guide to follow! In order to get the latest code and a step by step deployment procedure for a VxRack install, only certified services teams, partners and employees have access to download from the support portal. Each new version has a very detailed step by step guide so that there are no snowflakes. Since I was using my lab hardware I need to first check that the hardware I used had the correct Bios, Firmware and software versions to meet the minimum supported standard. I cheated a little here if I’m honest. I used VxRail nodes that were imaged with the latest version of software. I figured that way I didn’t need to manually update each node – I could use the proven VxRail engineering method to automate the update. I was right and this saved me a lot of time at the start. The only manual task I needed was to assign iDRAC ip addresses that match the guides OOB deployment network.

So now I had the nodes ready (I used 8 E series VxRail nodes). I needed to configure the networking layer. I had a Dell S3048 for the Management layer and a pair of Cisco 9372s for TOR. I needed to ensure the OS on these matched the guidelines, but that was easy to upgrade. Once I had that ready I needed to follow the wiring diagram. This was pretty straightforward and yet the only place where I made a simple mistake. Double and triple check your cables is my advice, especially if you are dyslexic when it comes to reading port labels. Once the cabling is in place, you can wipe the TOR switch config and put the Dell MGMT switch in ONIE mode. This allows the automated imaging process to image the switch layer as the first task of the deployment. The deployment network is actually setup on a private network on a simple flat switch, here you will connect the laptop that hosts the imaging appliance, port 48 on the S3048 and the management port of the S3048.

Using VMware workstation and the Dell EMC VxRack imaging appliance OVA that I downloaded, it’s very straightforward to load up the latest VxRack bundle, and specify the number of nodes you plan to image. The laptop that you use should also have a few tools like putty, Winscp and some Dell software like racadm and OpenManage BMC Utilities. This is used to run some health check scripts and to automate the PXE boot process. I kicked off the imaging from the appliance and it started by first imaging the S3048 management switch. A short time later it built the two TOR switches and then signaled it was ready to image the first node. Using a racadm script I put the nodes in PXE mode and powered them on one at a time, about 100 seconds apart. The VxRack imaging appliance provided the PXE server environment, recognized the nodes and began imaging them one by one. Once again I can’t highlight enough that the wiring is critical here, every port should match exactly according to the wiring diagram as the TOR and Management switch is strictly defined. When you power on the first node it becomes the first management node and the imaging appliance expects the iDRAC and Nics to match as it records the MAC addresses. I had a few cables that I had reused at this stage that really I should have replaced, and once I had done that everything went perfectly smoothly. Next up is the Bring-Up phase of the deployment. The first node that is imaged now has the SDDC manager VM and a Utility VM deployed, and that is what we will use to access the GUI for configuring the rest of the deployment (part 2 coming soon).

VxRail and RP4VMs : Better Together

It is always great to host customers at the CSC when they are exploring new Data Center designs or considering new technology they haven’t used before. It’s even better when we can help them on one successful purchase to host them again on a new project. We recently helped a customer that was interested in looking at HCI for a new project. They were interested in replacing a legacy design with Software defined and that included an active-active capability across multiple Data Centers.

They had been evaluating several vendors for HCI and we actually helped them test both XC (on ESXi) in a synchronous config and VxRail in a stretched config. The customer had a set of test criteria that meant they wanted to evaluate everything from deployment, through configuration, and failure scenarios plus ease of management and lifecycle updates. The interesting part of this testing was that we hosted the environment built to an agreed design, and then handed it over for their testing – which was all carried out remotely. When they needed to run some functional testing and to simulate node and site failures I jumped on a Skype session and assisted. This sped up drastically the amount of time required by the customer to complete all the testing they required. The timeline was quite tight as the customer needed to draft a comprehensive report on the results to share with their executive board in order to make the purchase decision.

In the end they went with a VxRail vSAN stretched cluster for the first phase of this project. We would later learn from their Partner (and my running buddy @VictorForde) that the second phase of the project was going to involve another VxRail stretch Cluster and Recoverpoint for Virtual machines. Once again they asked could we assist and build out a design that could test Recoverpoint running between VxRail Stretch clusters. This design would allow them to tolerate site failures and also protect against data corruption – giving them the ability to roll back to any point in time copies of their protected VMs. Victor said, “We configured the environment to remote replicate across two Stretch Clusters within a site with PiT rollback to protect across clusters within a site as well as rollback from logical corruption. vSAN does the protection across each side of the cluster so no RP4VM replication traffic between sites.”

Recoverpoint for VMs (RP4VMs) and VxRail with VMware vSAN are better together for several reasons. Firstly VxRail is the simplest starting point for a vSAN cluster. They are easy to size, simple to deploy and make the day to day management a breeze. RP4VMs is really easy to deploy (just drop the latest ova) in a VMware environment. Although RP4VMs is actually storage agnostic – vSAN is an excellent choice for operational simplicity and ease of….well just about everything storage related! RP4VMs uses a vCenter plug-in that tightly integrates management into vSphere and allows customers a simple interface with orchestration and automation capabilities. It only takes 7 clicks to protect a VM! Failing back is fast as well, no need extra step needed to copy the data, just roll through the journal to find the point in time needed. It also rolls from the latest copy back, rather than requires you to roll from the oldest first.

When the customer was finished with their testing they were confident in deployment, configuration, ease of use and disaster testing. The partner was also happy as they were able to be involved in the entire process from beginning and provide input while also documenting the steps and process involved. In fact the partner saw a future for this project that other customers might also like, they even gave the solution a new name vStretchPoint – not sure if marketing will run with it, but you never know!

Big thanks to the team involved in the testing for this POC they deserve most of the credit too; @sandybryce @victorforde @tebe155 @rw4shaw

Is HCI networking easy?

Even though hyper-converged solutions have been one of the hottest trends in the Datacenter since virtualization, you will still meet traditional architects that are seeing this technology for the first time. Many times the customer will come to the conversation with just the virtualization lead, sometimes they will bring the Storage or Compute team, but often they will forget to tell the Networking team any of their plans (no wonder the network engineer can be so grumpy). This can prove problematic for a networking team that is not familiar with a few of the basic HCI requirements. Continue reading “Is HCI networking easy?”

Hardware is not invisible – VxRail HCI appliance

One of the biggest pain points customers have when managing their current traditional architectures is patching and upgrades. They want a so

lution that helps them to keep updated but does not introduce risk or take a lot of work to validate and test. Pressures on headcount reductions don’t balance with demands from the business to do more at lower costs. Often preventative maintenance is the first to suffer, and that means existing infrastructure is left to fall further and further behind patching schedules. Continue reading “Hardware is not invisible – VxRail HCI appliance”

Does the H in HCI matter?

If twitter is where the conversation is then you might be following the debate about what exactly is HCI? and does it matter? Does it matter if the H in HCI is for Hypervisor or Hybrid if the outcome is the same? If the H is still really all about the hypervisor, then does it matter which one is used? What about the infrastructure, is it important or invisible in a software defined world? Continue reading “Does the H in HCI matter?”