vSphere

Walk through of new vSphere 5 web client interface

Posted by Brian on Jul 16, 2011 in vCenter Server, VMware, vSphere | 6 comments

In this post I will cover the new Web Interface that is available in vCenter 5 that was announced this past Tuesday. This is something that should be welcomed by non Windows users. With growing number of admins using Apple computers these days they have been long waiting for a way to manage their vSphere environment without having a Windows VM running also. The vCenter Web Interface is a Flex based console that is not fully featured yet but does offer many of the things you would need on a daily basis.

You definitely will not be using it to setup hosts and networks and that type of setup & configuration work. But you can create VMs and other daily functions as well as look at performance charts.

To get started point your browser to your vCenter server using a link similar to below. If you pint straight to the vCenter without the port and trailing string you will get a page similar to what your used to seeing in the past. It will allow you to download the regular vSphere Client and will also have a link to the web client.

Below you can see the login screen for the Web Client, nothing earth shattering from this view. Only thing to point out is at the bottom of the screen there is a download link for the Client Integration Plug-in. This is necessary to view the console of a VM through the web client. So download and install to get all of the functions opened up to you.

Manage a Virtual Machine with Web Client

The image below shows the summary view of a virtual machine. Its got pretty much all of the same details were used to seeing in the thick client. You get power status and details about VM hardware and storage. From this view you can control the power of the VM and edit its settings like in the past. At the end of this section I have included images of all the options located in the menu for a VM.

 

 From the next image we can see that the Monitor section includes sections for Tasks, Events, Performance and Alarms. These are all things you should be used to seeing also and are easily accessible in the Web Client also. I was pretty impressed with the performance chart options that are available with this being the first attempt by VMware. They have had practice by  using the Flex client model for View manager and vCloud director now.

The last section of the VM menu is resource management. You can have a look at the familiar looking CPU and Memory bar charts that we use in the regular client.

The group of images below show the menu options that are available to you when managing a virtual machine. You have the normal power options. Under configuration you can edit settings and upgrade Tools and virtual hardware. The Inventory menu allows you to Migrate or Clone. And the Snapshot menu give you the normal options you would expect.

 

Migrate a Virtual Machine with Web Client

This is a really nice feature to have available in the web client. This is something that in the past you would have had to fire up the full vSphere client to do. All the normal options seem to be available for this process.

 

 Edit VM properties in Web Client

This section is pretty straight forward and you can see form the two images below that all of the normal options are available to you in the Web Client. You can edit and add virtual hardware to you VMs.

This second image shows the normal VM Options that you can edit also.

Creating a Virtual Machine with Web Client

I’m not sure how much I will use this to start, but its pretty awesome that this feature is there at the beginning. You can create a VM from the Web Client, using all the same choices that you would normally.

Simple screen that allows you to name your virtual machine and select the folder location in the datacenter.

The next image shows you the ability to select the resources that it will run on. For example you can choose a host or cluster to place the VM on to start.

The next screen shows you available storage options. The Web Client provides you with plenty of detail to make educated decisions.

This section allows you to choose from available Virtual Machine hardware versions. It also explains the options for both so people can make educated decisions.

Next up in the process is to choose the guest operating system.

The last screen before the review allows you to adjust any of the virtual hardware that you want in your VM. There are plenty of options here and at first look I don’t see anything missing from the regular client.

ESXi 5 Host management from Web Client

From the image below you can see the summary screen that shows information about a ESXi host. All the normal details appear to be here and are presented in a easy to consume manor. From the right side of the screen you can see recent tasks and running tasks to keep an eye on what is happening in your environment.

The image below shows the monitoring screen so that you can view Tasks, Events, Alarms and Performance data on the vSphere host. This is also really nice to have in the Web Client so that you can see what is going on.

 

Cluster views form vSphere Web Client

The next image is the Cluster Summary view from the Web Client. These are not much different form the host views, they just present you with higher level details.

This image shows you cluster services to be able to view DRS information within the cluster. You can see History, Faults and Recommendations form this area.

 The last screen that I have shown here gives you Resource management details for the cluster. You can view whats happening cluster wide on CPU, Memory, Storage and utilization details.

 

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Facts about VMware vSphere 5 License changes

Posted by Brian on Jul 12, 2011 in vCenter Server, VMware, vSphere | 3 comments

In case you were sleeping today VMware announced vSphere 5 and all of its 150 plus glorious new features. I’ve been lucky enough to be using it for sometime in the Beta program and its really a big step forward. There are tons of new features that people have been waiting for.

But with all of the new stuff it seams a licensing change has kind of put a cloud over the shinny new features. Along with the new version VMware has change the licensing model that vSphere 5 will use, moving towards a vRAM pooled model that I will attempt to explain further. Now for some organizations this will be great and for others it will add additional cost.

There has been a lot of banter on twitter today about the licenses changes and in the VMware forums. I am holding back making a decision until I can digest this further. But from what it looks like is building a scaled up design model would be more expensive with the new licensing model.

Here is some highlights from the vSphere 5 license white paper that VMware release. You can download the full paper here.

 vSphere 5.0 will be licensed on a per-processor basis with a vRAM entitlement. Each vSphere 5.0 CPU license will entitle the
purchaser to a specific amount of vRAM, or memory configured to virtual machines. The vRAM entitlement can be pooled across
a vSphere environment to enable a true cloud or utility based IT consumption model. Just like VMware technology offers
customers an evolutionary path from the traditional datacenter to cloud infrastructure, the vSphere 5.0 licensing model allows
customers to evolve to a cloud-like “pay for consumption” model without disrupting established purchasing, deployment and license management practices and processes.

 

You will still be buying your licenses based on sockets but there is now the vRAM amount to factor in.

Licensing Unit: Per Processor (CPU)
vSphere 5.0 is still licensed on a per-processor basis, allowing customers to continue leveraging established purchasing,
deployment and license-management processes.

So what is a vRAM Entitlement
We have introduced vRAM, a transferable, virtualization-based entitlement to offer customers the greatest flexibility for vSphere configuration and usage. vRAM is defined as the virtual memory configured to virtual machines. When a virtual machine is created, it is configured with a certain amount of virtual memory (vRAM) available to the virtual machine. Depending on the edition, each vSphere 5.0-CPU license provides a certain vRAM capacity entitlement. When the virtual machine is powered on, the vRAM configured for that virtual machine counts against the total vRAM
entitled to the user. There are no restrictions on how vRAM capacity can be distributed among virtual machines: a customer can configure many small virtual machines or one large virtual machine. The entitled vRAM is a fungible resource configured to meet customer workload requirements.

What is Pooled vRAM Capacity in vSphere 5?
An important feature of the new licensing model is the concept of pooling the vRAM capacity entitlements for all processor licenses (see Figure 1). The vRAM entitlements of vSphere CPU licenses are pooled—that is, aggregated—across all CPU licenses managed by a VMware vCenter instance (or multiple linked VMware vCenter instances) to form a total available vRAM capacity (pooled vRAM capacity). If workloads on one server are not using their full vRAM entitlement, the excess capacity can be used by other virtual machines within the VMware vCenter instance. At any given point in time, the vRAM capacity consumed by all powered-on virtual machines within a pool must be equal or lower than the pooled vRAM capacity.

How would I monitor the Pooled vRAM Capacity
Available and consumed vRAM capacity can be monitored and managed using the licensing-management module of VMware vCenter Server. Customers can create reports and set up alerts to obtain automated notification of when the level of vRAM consumption surpasses a specified level of the available pooled capacity.

So if I run out of Pool vRAM how would I increase the Pooled vRAM Capacity
If necessary, the easiest way to expand pooled vRAM capacity is to add more vSphere CPU licenses of the same edition to the vRAM pool. Alternatively, customers can upgrade all CPU licenses in the vRAM pool to a vSphere edition with a higher base vRAM entitlement.

Some Licensing Examples

 vSphere 5 License pricing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Whats new in VMware vSphere ESXi 5

Posted by Brian on Jul 12, 2011 in VMware, vSphere | 2 comments

Following up on today’s announcement from VMware about vSphere 5 the next step towards building the cloud on VMware. I have gathered up some of the more important new and updated features on vSphere 5. There will be other posts written over the next weeks and months diving deeper into these features. But for now this will wet your appetite.

• Convergence. vSphere 5.0 is the first vSphere release built exclusively on the vSphere ESXi 5.0 hypervisor architecture as the host platform. VMware will not include ESX hypervisor architecture-based releases in this vSphere release or later releases. The vSphere 5.0 management platform, vCenter Server 5.0, provides support for ESXi 5.0 hosts as well as ESX/ESXi 4.x and ESX/ESXi 3.5 hosts.
• VMware vSphere Auto Deploy. Combining the features of host profiles, Image Builder, and PXE, VMware vSphere Auto Deploy simplifies the task of managing ESXi installation and upgrade for hundreds of machines. New hosts are automatically provisioned based on rules defined by the user. Rebuilding a server to a clean slate is as simple as a reboot. To move between ESXi versions, you update a rule using the Auto Deploy PowerCLI and perform a test compliance and repair operation.
• Unified CLI Framework. An expanded and enhanced esxcli framework offers a rich set of consistent and extensible commands, including new commands to facilitate on-host troubleshooting and maintenance. The framework allows consistency of authentication, roles, and auditing, using the same methods as other management frameworks such as vCenter Server and PowerCLI. You can use the esxcli framework both remotely as part of vSphere CLI and locally on the ESXi Shell (formerly Tech Support Mode).
• New Virtual machine capabilities. ESXi 5.0 introduces a new generation of virtual hardware with virtual machine hardware version 8, which includes the following new features:

o    32-way virtual SMP. ESXi 5.0 supports virtual machines with up to 32 virtual CPUs, which lets you run larger CPU-intensive workloads on the VMware ESXi platform.

o    1TB virtual machine RAM. You can assign up to 1TB of RAM to ESXi 5.0 virtual machines.

o    Nonhardware accelerated 3D graphics for Windows Aero support. ESXi 5.0 supports 3D graphics to run Windows Aero and Basic 3D applications in virtual machines.

o    USB 3.0 device support. ESXi 5.0 features support for USB 3.0 devices in virtual machines with Linux guest operating systems. USB 3.0 devices attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to a virtual machine and accessed within it. USB 3.0 devices connected to the ESXi host are not supported at this time.

o    UEFI virtual BIOS. Virtual machines running on ESXi 5.0 can boot from and use the Unified Extended Firmware Interface (UEFI).

• Graphical User Interface to configure multicore virtual CPUs. You can now configure the number of virtual CPU cores per socket in the Virtual Machine Properties view in the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere client. Previously this feature was only configurable through advanced settings.
• Client-connected USB devices. USB devices attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to a virtual machine and accessed within it.
• Smart card reader support for virtual machines. Smart card readers attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to one or more virtual machines and accessed within them. The virtual machine remote console, available in the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere Client, supports connecting smart card readers to multiple virtual machines, which can then be used for smart card authentication to virtual machines.
• Expanded support for VMware Tools versions. VMware Tools from vSphere 4.x is supported in virtual machines running on vSphere 5.0 hosts. Additionally, the version of VMware Tools supplied with vSphere 5.0 is also compatible with ESX/ESXi 4.x.
• Apple Mac OS X Server guest operating system support. VMware vSphere 5.0 adds support for the Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) as a guest operating system. Support is restricted to Apple Xserve model Xserve3,1 systems. For additional information, see the vSphere 5.0 RC Release notes.
• Host UEFI boot support.vSphere 5.0 supports booting ESXi hosts from the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). With UEFI you can boot systems from hard drives, CD-ROM drives, or USB media. Booting over the network requires the legacy BIOS firmware and is not available with UEFI.
• Support for up to 512 virtual machines. vSphere 5.0 supports up to 512 virtual machines totaling a maximum of 2048 virtual CPUs per host.
• Support for larger systems. vSphere 5.0 supports systems with up to 160 logical CPUs and up to 2TB RAM.
• Improved SNMP support. vSphere 5.0 adds the capability to convert CIM indications to SNMP traps. Check with your hardware vendor to see whether their CIM provider supports this functionality. In addition, vSphere 5.0 now supports the Host Resources MIB (RFC 2790) and allows for finer control over the types of traps sent by the SNMP agent.
• Storage DRS. This feature delivers the DRS benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement, and bottleneck avoidance to storage. You can group and manage similar datastores as a single load-balanced storage resource called a datastore cluster. Storage DRS makes VMDK placement and migration recommendations to avoid I/O and space utilization bottlenecks on the datastores in the cluster.
• Policy-driven storage delivery. This solution allows you to have greater control and insight into characteristics of your storage resources. It also enables virtual machine storage provisioning to become independent of specific storage available in the environment. You can define virtual machine placement rules in terms of storage characteristics and monitor a virtual machine’s storage placement based on these administrator-defined rules. The solution delivers these benefits by taking advantage of the following items:

Storage

o    Integrating with Storage APIs – Storage Awareness to deliver storage characterization supplied by storage vendors.

o    Enabling the vSphere administrator to tag storage based on customer-specific descriptions.

o    Using storage characterizations to create virtual machine placement rules in the form of storage profiles.

o    Providing easy means to check a virtual machine’s compliance against these rules.

As a result, managing storage usage and choice in vSphere deployments has become more efficient and user-friendly.

• VMFS5. VMFS5 is a new version of vSphere Virtual Machine File System that offers improved scalability and performance.
• Accelerator. An accelerator has been delivered for specific use with View (VDI) workloads. With this option configured in ESXi, a read cache is constructed in memory that is optimized for recognizing, handling, and deduplicating VDI client images. The cache is managed from within the View Composer and delivers a significant reduction, as high as 90% by early estimates, in IOPS from each ESXi host to the storage platform holding client images. This reduction in IOPS enables large scaling of the number of clients in case multiple I/O storms, typical in large VDI deployments, occur.
• iSCSI UI support. Usability improvements in this release include the ability to configure dependent hardware iSCSI and software iSCSI adapters along with the network configurations and port binding in a single dialog box using the vSphere Client. Full SDK access is also available for these configurations.
• Storage I/O Control NFS support. vSphere 5.0 extends Storage I/O Control (SIOC) to provide cluster-wide I/O shares and limits for NFS datastores.
• Storage APIs – Array Integration: Thin Provisioning. Offers an ability to reclaim blocks of a thin provisioned LUN on the array when a virtual disk is deleted.
• Swap to SSD. vSphere 5.0 provides new forms of SSD handling and optimization. The VMkernel automatically recognizes and tags SSD devices that are local to ESXi or are on the network. In addition, the VMkernel scheduler is modified to allow ESXi swap to extend to local or network SSD devices, which enables memory overcommitment and minimizes performance impact.
• 2TB+ LUN support. vSphere 5.0 provides support for 2TB+ VMFS datastores.
• Storage vMotion snapshot support. Allows Storage vMotion of a virtual machine in snapshot mode with associated snapshots. You can better manage storage capacity and performance by leveraging flexibility of migrating a virtual machine along with its snapshots to a different datastore.
• Enhanced Network I/O Control. vSphere 5.0 builds on network I/O control to allow user-defined network resource pools, enabling multi-tenancy deployment, and to bridge virtual and physical infrastructure QoS with per resource pool 802.1 tagging.
• vNetwork Distributed Switch Improvements. vSphere 5.0 provides improved visibility into virtual machine traffic through Netflow and enhances monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities through SPAN and LLDP.
• ESXi Firewall. The ESXi 5.0 management interface is protected by a service-oriented and stateless firewall, which you can configure using the vSphere Client or at the command line with esxcli interfaces. A new firewall engine eliminates the use of iptables and rule sets define port rules for each service. For remote hosts, you can specify the IP addresses or range of IP addresses that are allowed to access each service.
• Next-generation browser-based vSphere Client. A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex. The vSphere 5.0 release includes both the new browser-based client and the Windows-based client available in prior releases. In this release, the browser-based client includes a subset of the functionality available in the Windows-based client, primarily related to inventory display and virtual machine deployment and configuration.
• vCenter Server Appliance. A vCenter Server implementation running on a pre-configured Linux-based virtual appliance. This appliance significantly reduces the time required to deploy vCenter Server and associated services and provides a low-cost alternative to the traditional Windows-based vCenter Server.
• Inventory Extensibility. VMware customers and partners can extend vCenter Server in multiple ways, including the inventory, graphical user interface, and agents. vCenter Server includes a manager to monitor the extensions. By deploying extensions created by VMware partners, you can use vCenter Server as a unified console to manage your virtualized datacenter.
• Solution Installation and Management. The vCenter Solutions Manager provides a consistent interface to configure and monitor vCenter-integrated solutions developed by VMware and third parties. It provides a simpler installation, configuration, and monitoring interface for managing solutions. Using the new vSphere ESX Agent Manager, you can deploy, update, and monitor vSphere agents on ESXi hosts. vSphere agents inter-operate efficiently with other vSphere features such as maintenance mode and distributed power management.
• Enhanced logging support. vSphere 5.0 adds several enhancements to system message logging. All log messages are now generated by syslog, and messages can now be logged on either local and/or one or more remote log servers. A given server can log messages from more than one host. Log messages can be remotely logged using either the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or TCP connections. The vSphere syslog listener is available as an optional plug-in to vCenter on Windows; in the vCenter Virtual Appliance (VCVA), logging is accomplished using the native syslog-ng facility. With vSphere 5.0, log messages from different sources can be configured to go into different logs for more convenience. Configuration of message logging can also be accomplished using ESXCLI in addition to the vSphere client.
• Fault Domain Manager — VMware High Availability has been transformed into a cloud-optimized availability platform. With Fault Domain Manager, VMware HA is more reliable in operation, more scalable in its ability to protect virtual machines, and can provide better uptime than before. All hosts in the cluster can now be primary nodes while the cluster also uses shared storage as a channel for host heartbeat detection. This enables VMware HA to react accurately and efficiently to host failures, allowing customers to grow their vSphere cluster.

Networking

• Enhanced Network I/O Control. vSphere 5.0 builds on network I/O control to allow user-defined network resource pools, enabling multi-tenancy deployment, and to bridge virtual and physical infrastructure QoS with per resource pool 802.1 tagging.
• vNetwork Distributed Switch Improvements. vSphere 5.0 provides improved visibility into virtual machine traffic through Netflow and enhances monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities through SPAN and LLDP.
• ESXi Firewall. The ESXi 5.0 management interface is protected by a service-oriented and stateless firewall, which you can configure using the vSphere Client or at the command line with esxcli interfaces. A new firewall engine eliminates the use of iptables and rule sets define port rules for each service. For remote hosts, you can specify the IP addresses or range of IP addresses that are allowed to access each service.

VMware vCenter Server

• Next-generation browser-based vSphere Client. A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex. The vSphere 5.0 release includes both the new browser-based client and the Windows-based client available in prior releases. In this release, the browser-based client includes a subset of the functionality available in the Windows-based client, primarily related to inventory display and virtual machine deployment and configuration.
• vCenter Server Appliance. A vCenter Server implementation running on a pre-configured Linux-based virtual appliance. This appliance significantly reduces the time required to deploy vCenter Server and associated services and provides a low-cost alternative to the traditional Windows-based vCenter Server.
• Inventory Extensibility. VMware customers and partners can extend vCenter Server in multiple ways, including the inventory, graphical user interface, and agents. vCenter Server includes a manager to monitor the extensions. By deploying extensions created by VMware partners, you can use vCenter Server as a unified console to manage your virtualized datacenter.
• Solution Installation and Management. The vCenter Solutions Manager provides a consistent interface to configure and monitor vCenter-integrated solutions developed by VMware and third parties. It provides a simpler installation, configuration, and monitoring interface for managing solutions. Using the new vSphere ESX Agent Manager, you can deploy, update, and monitor vSphere agents on ESXi hosts. vSphere agents inter-operate efficiently with other vSphere features such as maintenance mode and distributed power management.
• Enhanced logging support. vSphere 5.0 adds several enhancements to system message logging. All log messages are now generated by syslog, and messages can now be logged on either local and/or one or more remote log servers. A given server can log messages from more than one host. Log messages can be remotely logged using either the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or TCP connections. The vSphere syslog listener is available as an optional plug-in to vCenter on Windows; in the vCenter Virtual Appliance (VCVA), logging is accomplished using the native syslog-ng facility. With vSphere 5.0, log messages from different sources can be configured to go into different logs for more convenience. Configuration of message logging can also be accomplished using ESXCLI in addition to the vSphere client.

Availability

• Fault Domain Manager — VMware High Availability has been transformed into a cloud-optimized availability platform. With Fault Domain Manager, VMware HA is more reliable in operation, more scalable in its ability to protect virtual machines, and can provide better uptime than before. All hosts in the cluster can now be primary nodes while the cluster also uses shared storage as a channel for host heartbeat detection. This enables VMware HA to react accurately and efficiently to host failures, allowing customers to grow their vSphere cluster.

 

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Running vSphere 4.0 ESXi embedded Hypervisor on IBM x3690 servers

Posted by Brian on Apr 18, 2011 in IBM Servers, VMware, vSphere | 8 comments

I’ve been working with a client lately on a datacenter move and they have selected IBM x3690 servers. The 3690′s will be the ESXi hosts for the new site and are running ESXi embedded. I have not had the opportunity to work with many different clients that choose the embedded route, so it was cool to see how IBM setup the servers.

The servers came with ESXi 4.0 installed on a USB stick from the factory and installed in one of the two internal USB ports that the server offers. Upon turning on the servers some of them booted right to VMware and some did not. After some further looking into the boot order in the BIOS I noticed that the Embedded Hypervisor option was not added to the boot order on a couple of the servers. A quick add and they were running just like the rest, guess someone at the factory missed that one.

The servers took a very long time to post and boot up, part of this was due to the 128 GB of RAM installed. We turned off some of the non-essentials and modified the boot order to go right to ESXi and cut the post time down some. You can see from the image below it’s just another x-series server.

I snapped the image below with the cover over showing off all the sticks of memory installed.

The last image below is a close up to the two USB ports that are internal to the server. The lower one as the USB stick from the factory with ESXi embedded on it.

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Installing network card drivers in VMware ESXi after install with vihostupdate

Posted by Brian on Apr 11, 2011 in CLI, vMA, VMware, vSphere | 0 comments

This is not something that I’ve had to do very often. But  on a recent customer engagement I was working with the client on setting up some new hosts that were recently purchased. These hosts were purchased with Embedded ESXi on them and additional PCI NICs were added to the config. The additional NICs did not have drivers available in the base ESXi build. Shortly after bringing the first host online we noticed that only the onboard NICs showed up in the list.

A quick search on Google for the Intel part number for the NIC lead me to the family name for the adapter. Then a search over at VMware lead me to the download page for VMware that provided the .ISO file to load the drivers into ESXi for the family of adapters. The process took only a few minutes and since this is something that does not come up that often I thought a short write up might help someone.

There are a few ways that this could be done, since we happened to be running ESXi the options were to use the vMA or vCLI. Since this was a new install and a vMA was not setup yet I just quickly tossed vCLI on a server. Then a quick download of the driver .ISO from VMware and unzip the package into a folder on the server with vCLI installed on it. If you wanted to use the vMA you could mount the .ISO to the virtual CD-ROM of the VM and issue the command against it.

Since I was using vCLI all I needed to do was point the command to a local folder. Here is a sample of the command used to perform the patch.

vihostupdate –server HOSTNAME –install –bundle c:\folder\name_of_file.zip

To run this command your host must be in Maintenance mode and it will then take just a couple of minutes to execute. After the update completes a reboot of the host is needed and then the cards should be available for use.

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ESXi management network issues when using EtherChannel and NIC teaming

Posted by mike on Mar 5, 2011 in vSphere | 1 comment

ESXi behavior with NIC trunking

Sometimes very challenging problems will arise.  Things that make you scratch your head, want to hurl your coffee cup, or just have a nice cold adult beverage.  Customers can change a projects requirements mid-way through, a vendor’s storage array code upgrade can go awry, or a two can creep into the ones and zeros.

In this section, we present examples of those crazy situations with the hopes of helping out our fellow engineers in the field before they become as frustrated as we have!

Recently in working with a customer, the request was for a new cluster comprised of ESXi 4.1 hosts.  They would be using just two onboard NICs for the vmkernel and virtual machine traffic.  These two NICs would feed into a pair of Cisco Nexus 5020’s, using virtual port channel (VPC).

Because of the use of VPC, the virtual switch load balancing needs to be set to IP Hash for the NIC teaming policy.  Okay, no sweat!  After installing ESXi and completing the initial configuration on the hosts, it was time to add the second NIC to vSwitch0 and plug it in.  (Note this configuration is all being done on the hosts directly as no vCenter server has been built yet).  After adding the second adapter to the active section of vSwitch0, and changing the NIC teaming policy to IP hash, we plugged in the second cable.

The host immediately lost connection from our vSphere client, and dropped off entirely from being able to be contacted.  No ping, no nothing!  This was most puzzling indeed:  we unplugged the second cable and the host started to ping again.  We thought maybe there was something wrong with the NIC itself, and so setup a separate NIC to take its place.  This had the same result, and we then thought to look at the switch.  After discussing the current configuration with the network engineer, we felt that his configuration was correct.  The configuration (and more!) can be found in the white paper put out by Cisco and VMware: “Deploying 10 Gigabit Ethernet on VMware vSphere 4.0 with Cisco Nexus 1000V and VMware vNetwork Standard and Distributed Switches – Version 1.0” This doc has been a very helpful during the implementation of this project.

So!  With the network being deemed not the problem and wearing a sheepish smile on my face after the network guy commented “it’s always the network isn’t it?” I returned to the host.  I then tried setting up both NICs on a non-nexus switch that is being used for out of band management, and they worked just fine using virtual port id for NIC teaming.  So at that point, I fired up the googalizer and did some checking.  I came across this KB article from VMware:

VMware KB 1022751:  NIC teaming using EtherChannel leads to intermittent network connectivity in ESXi

Details:

When trying to team NICs using EtherChannel, the network connectivity is disrupted on an ESXi host. This issue occurs because NIC teaming properties do not propagate to the Management Network portgroup in ESXi.
When you configure the ESXi host for NIC teaming by setting the Load Balancing to Route based on IP hash, this configuration is not propagated to Management Network portgroup.

So, based on this very helpful information, I followed the instructions listed in the KB and had great success.  Now my ESXi hosts are talking on both NICs via IP Hash and life is good.

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