What is vSphere Flash Read Cache aka vFlash?

Flash Read Cache helps in accelerating virtual machine performance through the use of flash devices residing in Esxi host as a cache.

vFlash was first introduced in vSphere 5.5. It allows you to use local SSD disks of Esxi host to create a caching layer for your virtual machines. By using host local SSD’s, you can offload some of the IO from your SAN storage to these local SSD disks.

vFlash aggregates local flash devices into a pool and this pool is called “Virtual flash resource” (vFRC). For example if you have 3 x 60 GB SSD you end up with a 180 GB virtual flash resource. Each local SSD configured for vFRC is formatted with a filesystem called VFFS  aka “Virtual Flash File System”.

 

vFRC helps reducing lowering application latency as the read IO don’t have to go all the way down to SAN across all the physical network controllers/storage controllers etc and instea they just go to vFRC.… Read More

My first interaction with iSCSI and port binding was back in 2013 when we introduced an iSCSI based SAN (Dell MD3200i) in our environment. We were a small SMB entity and introduction of SAN for our vSphere environment was a very big thing for me as an administrator.

This was our architecture back then

I clearly remember that before starting the SAN implementation, I was contacted by Dell engineer to do some pre-work which included creating 2 vmkernel portgroup and each with only one vNIC as active and one as unused so as to achieve multipathing with iSCSI.

At that time I was aware of multipathing and what it does, but I was confused on Active/Unused adapter configuration (as I was still learning) and when the actual implementation started, the implementation guy explained it and that was first time when I heard the word Port Binding.

Its time to refresh the concepts now as I am going through my VCAP preparations.… Read More

When you create a new datastore in vSphere, each VMFS volume is assigned a unique identifier (UUID) and this UUID info is stored in a metadata file as unique hexadecimal number.

You can see these UUID via ssh console of Esxi host.  In the /vmfs/volumes directory, each VMFS volume has a long string and a human readable names (which we configure from GUI while creating a datastore) as links to the UUID.

The UUID is comprised of four components. Lets understand this by taking example of one of the vmfs volume’s UUID : 591ac3ec-cc6af9a9-47c5-0050560346b9

• System Time (591ac3ec)
• CPU Timestamp (cc6af9a9)
• Random Number (47c5)
• MAC Address – Management Port uplink of the host used to re-signature or create the datastore (0050560346b9)

In my example, the mac address was of the Management NIC of my first Esxi host

When a LUN is replicated or its snapshot is taken on the storage side, the copied LUN is identical to original one.… Read More

Raw Device Mapping aka RDM is a way for providing virtual machine direct access to LUN on the SAN storage. The LUN presented to VM can be then formatted with any filesystem like NTFS or FAT for Windows OS and thus there is no need to format the LUN with VMFS filesystem and then place a vmdk on it.

RDM can be think of as a symbolic link from a VMFS volume to the Raw LUN. When an RDM is mapped to a virtual machine, a mapping file is created.This mapping file acts as a proxy for the physical device and contains metadata used for managing and redirecting access to the raw disk.

When the virtual machine tries to access the LUN, the mapping file is read to obtain the reference to the raw LUN and then the reads and writes go directly to the raw LUN rather than going through the mapping file.… Read More

VMware vSphere hot add is a feature that allows vSphere administrators to increase the RAM and CPU capacity of a running virtual machine on the fly. This feature is one of my favourites (second to vMotion). Hot add of CPU is usually referred as hot-plug, but I will be using term hot add for both RAM & CPU.

What so special about hot-add?

Think of older times when a physical server used to run out of resources (cpu/memory) and the administrator has to do shutdown the server to increase the capacity of server. Shutting down of server itself was a big headache in those time as the administrator has to get approval from the application owner, create a change request for maintenance etc etc.

At that time if someone would have explained me that you can add CPU/RAM into a server in running condition, I would have laughed hard on him and may be I would have given him titles like mad,crazy and what not.… Read More

When a virtual machine is created, there are number of files that are created alongwith. The most important among them is the .vmx file which is the configuration file of the VM. Whatever settings we chose during deployment of virtual machine, is written in this file along with many other configuration settings.

Although most of the virtual machine settings can be edited via web client, we can modify the vmx file directly (not recommended though) also to change configuration settings or to add some extra configuration items.

When we edit the virtual machine settings from Web Client, those settings are written in vmx file of the vm. To do so the VM needs to be in powered-off state.

To modify the settings of a virtual machine, login to Web Client and select VM from the inventory and navigate to Manage > Settings > VM Options > Advanced settings and click on Edit button to make changes to the current configuration.… Read More

In this post we will discuss about the different type of scsi controllers that are available with VMware vSphere and when to use which type of controller. We will discuss following topics in this post:

• What is SCSI controller and their types
• Why SCSI controller selection is so important
• Storage Controller Compatibility
• Adding/Changing SCSI controllers in virtual machines
• Changing controller type by modifying virtual machine vmx file

so lets get started.

What is SCSI controller and their types?

SCSI controllers are used by virtual machine to access SCSI disks and other SCSI devices such as CD/DVD ROM. SCSI controllers are added automatically when a VM is deployed. Controllers can be added/modified also post creation of VM.

When a VM is created, the default controller that is assigned to it is optimized for best performance and the controller selection depends purely on the guest OS chosen at the time of VM creation.… Read More

VUM Orchestrated upgrades allow you to upgrade the objects in your vSphere inventory in a two-step process: host upgrades followed by virtual machine upgrades. If you want the upgrade process to be fully automated, you can configure it on cluster level or you can configure this at the individual host or virtual machine level for granular control.

Before going ahead with orchestrated upgrade, we have to ensure that we have baseline groups created for hosts as well as VM’s. I will talk more on this later in the post.

In orchestrated upgrade, we have to first remediate the cluster against the host upgrade baseline (we covered creation/remediation in our last post). Once the hosts are upgraded, we remediate the same cluster against a virtual machine upgrade baseline group containing the VM Hardware Upgrade to Match Host and VMware Tools Upgrade to Match Host baselines.

How Orchestrated upgrade works?

• Orchestrated upgrade of ESXi Hosts

Patches/extensions and upgrades can be applied to an Esxi host by using host baseline group.… Read More

In last post we learn how to configure UMDS and how to enable VUM to use shared repository for downloading patches. If you are new to VUM/UMDS and by mistake landed directly on this page, I would encourage reading about them first from below links:

1: Installing vSphere Update Manager and Update Manager Download Service

2: Configure Update Manager Download Service

Also in past I have written one blog post on Creating Esxi hosts baselines and how to remediate host. You can read that post from here.

In this post I will be covering below objectives:

• Configure hosts/cluster settings
• Create VUM baseline group
• Manually download updates to a patch repository
• Import Host upgrade images and upgrade Esxi hosts.
• Configure Smart Rebooting for vApps

Lets get started.

1: Configure hosts/cluster settings

To configure hosts  maintenance mode settings, Login to Web Client and Click on  Update Manager icon from home page and naviate to Manage > Settings > Host and clusters settings >> Edit.… Read More

Last year I wrote a post on how to install and configure VUM and UMDS, but never got chance to connect UMDS to VUM and ended up downloading patches directly on VUM server via internet.

Once again I am playing with UMDS in lab and in this post we will cover why we need UMDS and how to configure it.

I am not covering steps for installing VUM/UMDS here because they are pretty straight forward and if you are new to these things, you can read the instructions about installation steps from here.

What is Update Manager Download Service?

Update Manager Download Service (UMDS) is an optional component which you can deploy with update manager. We can download upgrades for virtual appliances, patch metadata, patch binaries and notifications etc using UMDS.

Why we need UMDS when VUM is there?

Its a obvious question to ask that why we need UMDS when VUM is capable of downloading and installing patches on Esxi hosts/vApps.… Read More