Vsphere on The IT Hollow

vSphere 7 with Tanzu - Getting Started Guide

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 14:16:18 +0000

VMware released the new version of vSphere with functionality to build and manage Kubernetes clusters. This series details how to deploy, configure, and use a lab running vSphere 7 with Kubernetes enabled.

The instructions within this post are broken out into sections. vSphere 7 requires pre-requisites at the vSphere level as well as a full NSX-T deployment. Follow these steps in order to build your own vSphere 7 with Kubernetes lab and start using Kubernetes built right into vSphere.

Enable Workload Management

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:44:36 +0000

This post focuses on enabling the workload management components for vSphere 7 with Kubernetes. It is assumed that the vSphere environment is already in place and the NSX-T configuration has been deployed.

To enable workload management, login to your vCenter as the administrator@vsphere.local account. Then in the Menu, select Work

Within the Workload Management screen, click the ENABLE button.

The first screen in the wizard, will list your compatible vSphere clusters. These clusters must have HA and DRS enabled in fully automated mode. If you are missing clusters, make sure you have ESXi hosts on version 7 with HA and DRS enabled. You’ll also need a Distributed switch on version 7 for these clusters.

vSphere 7 with Kubernetes Environment and Prerequisites

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:42:33 +0000

This post describes the lab environment we’ll be working with to build our vSphere 7 with Kubernetes lab and additional prerequisites that you’ll need to be aware of before starting. This is not the only topology that would work for vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, but it is a robust homelab that would mimic many production deployments except for the HA features. For example, we’ll only install one (singular) NSX Manager for the lab where in a production environment would have three.

Tier-0 Gateway

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:39:41 +0000

This post will review the deployment and configuration of a Tier-0 gateway to provide north/south routing into the NSX-T overlay networks.

The Tier-0 (T0) gateway is where we’ll finally connect our new NSX-T backed overlay segments to the physical network through an NSX-T Edge which was previously deployed.

The Tier-0 gateway will connect directly to a physical VLAN and on the other side to our T1 router deployed in the previous post. From there, we should have all the plumbing we need to route to our hosts and begin using NSX-T to do some cooler stuff. In the end, the network topology will look something like this:

Tier-1 Gateway and NSX Segments

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:36:56 +0000

This post will focus on deploying our first NSX Gateway/Router and setting up our overlay segments. Before you can start these steps, the Edge nodes should be up and running so that they can support the Tier-1 gateways.

NSX uses two types of routers/gateways. We’ll start by using a Tier-1 (T1) router. These routers are usually used to pass traffic between NSX overlay segments. We could create NSX segments without any routers, but it would require a router to pass traffic between these segments so we will create a T1 router first.

Deploy NSX-T Edge Nodes

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:26:22 +0000

NSX-T Edge nodes are used for security and gateway services that can’t be run on the distributed routers in use by NSX-T. These edge nodes do things like North/South routing, load balancing, DHCP, VPN, NAT, etc. If you want to use Tier0 or Tier1 routers, you will need to have at least 1 edge node deployed. These edge nodes provide a place to run services like the Tier0 routes. When you first deploy an edge, its like an empty shell of a VM until these services are needed.

NSX Pools, Zones, and Nodes Setup

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:23:46 +0000

In the previous post we deployed an NSX Manager. Now it’s time to start configuring NSX so that we can build cool routes, firewall zones, segments, and all the other NSX goodies. And even if we don’t want to build some of these things, we’ll need this setup for vSphere 7 with Kubernetes.

Add an IP Pool

The first thing we’ll setup is an IP Pool. As you might guess, an IP Pool is just a group of IP Addresses that we can use for things. Specifically, we’ll use these IP Addresses to assign Tunnel Endpoints (Called TEPs previously called VTEPs in NSX-V parlance) to each of our ESXi hosts that are participating in the NSX Overlay networks. The TEP becomes the point in which encapsulation and decapsulation takes place on each of the ESXi hosts. Think of it this way, when encapsulated traffic needs to be routed to a VM on a host, what IP Address do we need to send the traffic to, so that it can reach that VM. This is the TEP. We need to setup a TEP on each host, and the IP Addresses for these TEPs come from an IP Pool. Since I have three hosts, and expect to deploy 1 edge nodes, I’ll need a TEP Pool with at least 4 IP Addresses. Size your environment appropriately.

NSX Installation

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:18:52 +0000

This post will focus on getting the NSX-T Manager deployed and minimally configured in the lab. NSX-T is a pre-requisite for configuring vSphere 7 with Kubernetes as of the time of this writing.

Deploy the NSX Manager

The first step in our build is to deploy the NSX Manager from an OVA template into our lab. The NSX Manager is the brains of the solution and what you’ll be interacting with as a user. Each time you configure a route, segment, firewall rule, etc., you’ll be communicating with the NSX Manager. Download and deploy the OVA into your vSphere lab.

Deploy Kubernetes on vSphere

Wed, 08 Jan 2020 15:00:04 +0000

If you’re struggling to deploy Kubernetes (k8s) clusters, you’re not alone. There are a bunch of different ways to deploy Kubernetes and there are different settings depending on what cloud provider you’re using. This post will focus on installing Kubernetes on vSphere with Kubeadm. At the end of this post, you should have what you need to manually deploy k8s in a vSphere environment on ubuntu.

Prerequisites

NOTE: This tutorial uses the “in-tree” cloud provider for vSphere. This is not the preferred method for deployment going forward. More details can be found here for reference.

Deploy Kubernetes Using Kubeadm - CentOS7

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 15:35:36 +0000

I’ve been wanting to have a playground to mess around with Kubernetes (k8s) deployments for a while and didn’t want to spend the money on a cloud solution like AWS Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes or Google Kubernetes Engine . While these hosted solutions provide additional features such as the ability to spin up a load balancer, they also cost money every hour they’re available and I’m planning on leaving my cluster running. Also, from a learning perspective, there is no greater way to learn the underpinnings of a solution than having to deploy and manage it on your own. Therefore, I set out to deploy k8s in my vSphere home lab on some CentOS 7 virtual machines using Kubeadm. I found several articles on how to do this but somehow I got off track a few times and thought another blog post with step by step instructions and screenshots would help others. Hopefully it helps you. Let’s begin.

Determine the Number of vSphere Clusters to Use

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 14:15:10 +0000

The number of clusters that should be used for a vSphere environment comes up for every vSphere design. The number of clusters that should be used isn’t a standard number and should be evaluated based on several factors.

Number of Hosts

Let’s start with the basics, if the design calls for more virtual machines than can fit into a single cluster, then it’s obvious that multiple clusters must be used. The same is true for a design that calls for more hosts that can fit into a single cluster or any other cluster maximums.

vRealize Automation 7 Simple Installation

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:00:21 +0000

This is our first stop in our journey to install vRealize Automation 7 and all of it’s new features. This post starts with the setup of the environment and assumes that you’ve deployed a vRealize Automation appliance from an OVA and that you’ve also got a Windows Server deployed so that we can install the IAAS components on it.

After you’ve deployed the vRA7 OVA, login to the appliance with the root login and password supplied during your OVA deployment.

VMware SSL Automation Tool - Error Generating pfx

Mon, 29 Dec 2014 16:13:20 +0000

During the process of setting up a new vCenter Server in my lab, I ran into an issue adding SSL Certificates to my vCenter services. I followed my own blog posts about how to do this so that I wouldn’t miss anything, but nevertheless ran into an error that took me quite a while to get fixed.

After creating all my certificate requests using the VMware SSL Automation Tool, I updated my SSO with my custom certificate without issue. The next step is to make sure the Inventory Service trusts the new SSO Certificate, which also went without a hitch.

Know Heads from Tails about Linux

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 13:26:20 +0000

There are a few Linux commands that vSphere Administrators should know for basic troubleshooting purposes and I wanted to take a second to review them in case you’ve typically been a Windows Administrator (like me).

First, traversing the Linux file system is pretty similar to going through Windows directories from the command line.

change directories

Windows : CD C:dirname

Linux : cd /dirname

Show files and folders

Windows : dir

Test Connections from an ESXi Host Using vmkping

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 16:19:10 +0000

If you’ve been in a situation where you need to test connectivity, you’ve probably used the ping command. But what do you do when you’re trying to test connectivity from an ESXi host? Luckily there is a command called vmkping that will allow you to test from the host.

The first thing that you need to do is to SSH into your ESXi host. Turn the SSH Service on from the Configuration –> Security Profile Tab. Then you can use your favorite ssh client and remote into your host.

vCenter HA Datastore Heartbeats

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 15:00:02 +0000

High Availability is a great reason to virtualize your servers. It can help reduce downtime by automatically rebooting virtual machines in the case of a host failure. But, a relatively minor host issue should not cause the reboot of all of your virtual machines. This is where vCenter HA datastore heartbeats are useful. Let’s first look at a basic example of HA. Below is our normal environment with no failures. We have a few VMs on each host and the hosts are connected to a pair of datastores and a network switch. Now assume we have a host failure, we now need to have HA kick in and reboot the virtual machines on the failed host, over on the still working hosts. HA is working great and is a great feature, but lets take a look at what happens if the Management network were to fail. Without datastore heartbeats involved, the two hosts wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other over the network so the two of them would assume that the other was failed. But by looking at the example below we can see that even though the Management network is down, the virtual machines and their network is working just fine. This means that no outages are being noticed by end users so we DON’T want HA to kick in because the virtual machines will restart.

PernixData FVP 1.5 Beta

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:50:50 +0000

Good news for all of you eagerly awaiting the next iteration of the PernixData FVP software. Version 1.5 is now in Beta and you can request the download for your own testing from the following link http://info.pernixdata.com/Betaprogram.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing I am a PernixPro which entitles me to early access to software, licenses or other merchandise. The thoughts expressed in this post are my own and have not been vetted by PernixData.

VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Guide

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 14:02:37 +0000

This is a Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Guide to help understand the design, installation, operation and architecture of setting up VMware SRM 5.5

SRM 5.5 Architecture SRM 5.5 Installation SRM 5.5 Site Configuration SRM 5.5 VM Replication Configuration

SRM 5.5 Array Replication Configuration

SRM 5.5 Virtual Appliance Replication SRM 5.5 Protection Groups SRM 5.5 Recovery Plans SRM 5.5 Bulk IP Customizations SRM 5.5 Test Recovery SRM 5.5 Recovery SRM Gotchas

Official Documentation Links

SRM 5.5 Release Notes SRM 5.5 Compatibility Matrix SRM 5.5 Documentation Center SRM Port Numbers SRM Product Page

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 13:00:53 +0000

I think the Olsen twins have been using FT longer than VMware has.

Awesome! So you’ve got your brand new shiny VMware cluster all setup with HA and think, “Man, I’m in great shape now. Downtime is a thing of the past!”.

Well, not so fast! VMware High Availability just means that if a physical host fails, the virtual machines can reboot on another host which LIMITS your downtime. What if your machines are so critical that you can’t have this reboot time in the case of a host failure? The answer might be VMware Fault Tolerance (FT).

Windows Server 2012 as a Storage Device for vSphere Home Lab

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:30:39 +0000

If you’ve got a some hardware lying around for your lab, Windows Server 2012 may be a great solution for a home storage device. You can now do both block (iSCSI) and NAS (NFS) on the same server, as well as having an OS to install some management apps on it. In my lab, I use this management server to run Veeam for my backups, PRTG network monitor for bandwidth tracking, as well as using this server for both iSCSI targets and NFS mounts.

Are you thin or thick? Where at?

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:47:47 +0000

I’m often asked about how to provision virtual machine disks. This almost always comes down to, “Should I use thick or thin disks?” and then “Should I do thin provisioning on the array or on the hypervisor?”

So here we go: Thin vs Thick

Thin provisioning:

Thin provisioned disks don’t allocate all of the space during the provisioning of the storage. Instead, they allocate the space on demand. This is a great way to get more bang for you buck out of your storage. Let’s take a closer look with an example.

Understanding VMware Slot Sizes

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:45:12 +0000

VMware slot sizes are an important topic if you’re concerned with how many ESXi hosts are required to run your environment.

What is a Slot?

To begin this post, we need to understand what a slot is. A slot is the minimum amount of CPU and memory resources required for a single VM in an ESXi cluster. Slot size is an important concept because it affects admission control.

A VMware ESXi cluster needs a way to determine how many resources need to be available in the event of a host failure. This slot calculation gives the cluster a way to reserve the right amount of resources.

VMware Ballooning explained

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:20:29 +0000

In my last post I explained a memory reclamation technique called Transparent Page Sharing. This post is dedicated to the Balloon driver method.

The first thing to be clear about is that Memory Ballooning is a technique that is only engaged when the host is running low on physical memory. If you have a host with 60 GB of physical memory available and the virtual machines are only allocated a total of 30GB of memory, then you may never need to know what memory ballooning is all about. However if you are over committing your hosts then this is an important topic to review.

Memory De-duplication in VMware

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:15:01 +0000

One of the companies I worked for got a Netapp filer and I loved the fact that it would dedupe the data that was sitting on disk. I got over 40% more storage just by having that sweet little feature on. I was thinking, “How awesome would it be to dedupe my memory?” Getting more memory out of my servers would be a nice thing. Well as it turns out, VMware does this already, but they call it “Transparent Page Sharing.”

Software iSCSI load balancing in ESXi 5

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:14:56 +0000

When you team NICs together in ESXi 5 you can pick from a variety of load balancing techniques to determine how traffic should flow over the adapters. You might think that setting up software iSCSI initiators in ESXi would be done in a similar manner. Add a VMkernel to a vSwitch, add a couple of adapters and set a teamingfailover policy. It turns out that this is not the case. You could setup a software iSCSI initiator this way, but it won’t provide you the teaming or failover you’ve intended.

My VCAP5-DCA Experience

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:06:24 +0000

I just found out that I’ve passed the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 - Datacenter Administration exam and wanted to share my experience.

When I first set out to take on this exam, I was apprehensive about it because of the number of possible questions that could be asked on it. The blueprint was quite large and covered basically everything related to vSphere. I got some helpful advice from a friend who told me that instead of worrying about if I could pass the exam, think about it like vSphere Olympics. It’s a chance to show off how much you know. It was a subtle change, but a different mindset really helped me.

vSphere 5.1 SSO issues

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:00:09 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing a lot of customers having issues logging into vCenter after upgrading to vSphere 5.1. I upgraded the lab and had some issues as well, but was able to fix the issues and wanted to share what I’ve learned. As you may know version 5.1 of vSphere requires the SSO service to be installed before vCenter can be upgraded. SSO is required for this version and cannot be skipped.

HP Insight Control for vCenter

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:15:10 +0000

I recently tried out the HP Insight Control plugin for vCenter and was very pleased about the added functionality that was provided in my vSphere client.

http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/integration.html

This plugin gives you additional control of your HP servers and storage that are being used by your vSphere environment. Like other storage vendors, the install will configure your VASA plugin, and will also allow you to do things such as create datastores and snapshots on the storage array from the vSphere Client.

VMware Path Masking

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:15:34 +0000

I’ve written posts in the past regarding LUN masking on a storage array, but it is possible to mask a path directly from your vSphere environment. I feel that if at all possible the masking should be handled at array level because the array is closest to the disk. Let’s face it, if vSphere shouldn’t see a LUN for one reason or another, then why is the array presenting it in the first place?

vSphere 5 AutoDeploy Basics

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 13:55:52 +0000

vSphere AutoDeploy always seemed like a lot of work to setup just to deploy a few VMware hosts, but in my current job I don’t setup hosts very often. If you are constantly deploying new hosts to get out in front of performance issues, or are building a new datacenter and deploying many hosts at once, AutoDeploy can be a great way to get up and running quickly.

Prerequisites

In order to use AutoDeploy, you’ll first need vSphere5, the AutoDeploy Install (which is on the vCenter Media), the vSphere5 Offline Bundle, PowerCLI, a DHCP Server and a TFTP server for starters.

Netapp VASA Provider 1.0

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:58:25 +0000

Netapp has released their vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) provider 1.0 to their support site. http://support.netapp.com If you’re not that familiar with the VASA concept, this article should explain what it is and how it’s used in regards to VMware vSphere 5.

What is VASA?

VASA Providers collect information about your storage systems and present that information to vSphere. In previous versions of vSphere, an administrator might need to keep track of hisher datastores in a spreadsheet or have a naming convention that showed the properties of an individual datastore. For example, if your storage system had both SSD and Sata disks, the Datastore might be named VMFS01_SSD or something similar.

VMware Site Recovery Manager Basic Setup

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:23:49 +0000

Finally, the idea of running a Disaster Recovery test is manageable. VMware Site Recovery Manager combined with vSphere has made it possible to test a failover to a warm site without worrying that the DR test itself will cause an outage.

Setting up Site Recovery Manager and performing a site failover sounds like a daunting task, but VMware has made this very simple, assuming you are familiar with vSphere already. If you already have a virtual environment setup at both your production site and a secondary site, SRM is pretty simple to get started with but allows for almost any DR Plan you can think of to be run.

SQL HA Mirroring with vCenter

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 21:27:51 +0000

We’re probably all aware of the benefits of clustering things like SQL Server in order to provide highly available data. But shared storage clustering has some drawbacks on VMware ESXi clusters such as not being able to vMotion.

• Database Mirroring – SQL Server database mirrors utilize a non-shared storage availability solution, using built-in SQL Server replication technology to create and maintain one or more copies of each database on other SQL Servers in the environment. SQL Server database mirrors provide application-aware availability, and the lack of a quorum disk makes this a VMware-friendly solution, allowing the full use of vMotion, DRS, and HA.

Netapp VSC4 Optimization and Migration

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:40:13 +0000

One of my most frequently read articles is on how to use MBRAlign to align your virtual machine disks on Netapp storage. Well, after Netapp has released their new Virtual Storage Console (VSC4) the tedious task of using MBRAlign might be eased for some admins.

Optimization and Migration The new VSC4 console for vSphere has a new tab called Optimization and Migration. Here you are able to scan all or some of your datastores to check the alignment of your virtual machines. The scan manager can even be set on a schedule so that changes to the datastore will be recognized.

Overview of vStorage API Array Integration (VAAI)

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:06:36 +0000

Many storage providers have been working with VMware to improve performance of disks by giving VMware access to invoke capabilities of the storage system. There are basically three main primitives that VMware can invoke to do this.

Full Copy
Hardware Assisted Locking
Block Zeroing

Full Copy

Lets look at what happens when you clone a VM without VAAI. The ESXi server will start to copy the blocks of the original VM and start to paste them in the new location. Below is an animation to describe this process.

Extending Windows System Drives with vSphere

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:29:13 +0000

vSphere has made it very simple to resize disks. They old days of finding larger disks to put in your severs and cloning or migrating data aren’t necessary now that virtualization has become widely used.

If you’re using vSphere you can easily extend non system drives by changing the size of the Hard Disk, and then going into the virtual machine and using diskpart or Disk Manager and extending the drive.