Network IO Control in vSphere 6

Posted on 08-10-2017 by Manish Jha

In this post we will discuss about what is NIOC and why we need it. We will also configure NIOC in lab.

What is Network IO Control (NIOC)?

Network I/O Control (NIOC) was first introduced with vSphere 4.1 and it is a vDS feature that allows a vSphere administrator to prioritize different type of network traffic by making use of Resource pools and shares/limits etc. NIOC does the same for network tarffic which SIOC does for storage traffic.

What problem NIOC is solving?

In old days physical servers were equipped with as many as 8 (or more) ethernet cards and administrators (as a best practice) configured vSphere to use dedicated NIC for passing various network traffic like management traffic or vMotion or fault tolerance. Managing these many physical cables were a bit cumbersome.

Modern day servers addressed this issue by introducing servers with support for 10 GBPS/40 GBPS network speed and these servers have only 2 NIC’s and all the traffic is passed via these 2 NIC’s.… Read More

vSwitch NIC Teaming and Network Failure Detection Policies

Posted on 07-10-2017 by Manish Jha

What is NIC Teaming and why you need it?

Uplinks is what provides connectivity between a vSwitch and a physical switch. This uplinks passes all the traffic generated by virtual machines or the vmkernel adapters.

But what happens when that physical network adapter fails, when the cable connecting that uplink to the physical network fails, or the upstream physical switch to which that uplink is connected fails? With a single uplink, network connectivity to the entire vSwitch and all of its ports or port groups is lost. This is where NIC teaming comes in.

NIC teaming means that we are taking multiple physical NICs on a given ESXi host and combining them into a single logical link that provides bandwidth aggregation and redundancy to a vSwitch. NIC teaming can be used to distribute load among the available uplinks of the team.

Below diagram illustrates vSwitch connectivity to physical world using 2 uplinks.… Read More

Configuring vCD 9.0 To Send Metric Data to Cassandra DB

Posted on 05-10-2017 by Manish Jha

In last post of this series, we learnt how to install and configure Cassandra DB for collecting metrics data from vCD. We also discussed that kairosdb is no longer needed to be installed alongwith cassandra for this purpose.

In this post we will learn how to configure vCD 9.0 to send metrics data to Cassandra DB.

This configuration is done by using cell management tool utility which is located in /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin directory.

Run cell-management-tool cassandra –help command to see all available options which you need to specify to configure vCD correctly so that it start sending all metrics data to cassandra.

Typically this is the command to do so:

[root@vcd90 ~]# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool cassandra –configure –create-schema –cluster-nodes 192.168.109.53 –username cassandra –password cassandra –port 9042 –ttl 15

Verifying Cassandra settings...
Cassandra setting valid for node: 192.168.109.51
Cassandra configuration settings verified successfully
vcloud_metrics keyspace created...
vm_metrics table created...
adding configured metrics to the schema...

Installing Cassandra DB for collecting vCD 9.0 Metrics Data

Posted on 04-10-2017 by Manish Jha

Cassandra DB is needed for capturing and storing vCloud Director metrics data so that it can be displayed in portal to end users so that users are aware of VM resource utilization etc.

Prior to vCD v9.0, we needed kairosdb + cassandra together for capturing and storing the metrics data, but things have changed now. VMware has removed the requirement of kairosdb and now metrics data can be sent straight to cassandra database. This metric data in turn can be viewed in tenant UI.

As per vCD 9.0 documentation

Cassandra is an open source database that you can use to provide the backing store for a scalable, high-performance solution for collecting time series data like virtual machine metrics. If you want vCloud Director to support retrieval of historic metrics from virtual machines, you must install and configure a Cassandra cluster and use the cell-management-tool to connect the cluster to vCloud Director.

Find vCloud Director Orphaned VM’s

Posted on 03-10-2017 by Manish Jha

We all are familiar with concept of orphaned VM’s in vSphere. However orphaned VM’s in vCloud Director have slightly different meaning.

From vCD perspective, virtual machines that are referenced in the vCenter database but not in the vCloud Director database are considered orphan VMs because vCD cannot access them even though they may be consuming compute and storage resources. This kind of reference mismatch can arise for a number of reasons, including high-volume workloads, database errors, and administrative actions.

Starting with vCD 8.2, VMware added one more option to cell management utility to locate such orphaned VM’s so that they can be removed or re-imported into vCloud Director. This utility is not available with any vCD version prior to 8.20.

The command to find orphaned VM’s is find-orphan-vms command which is used in conjunction with cell-management-tool and enables an administrator to list these VMs .

To list the options available with this command, run command:

# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool find-orphan-vms –help

If you are using self-signed certificates in vCD, then you have to specify truststore file and truststore password along with supplying vcd username/password and vcenter credentials etc.… Read More

Migrate vCloud Director 9.0 DB from MSSQL to Postgres

Posted on 02-10-2017 by Manish Jha

With vCloud Director 9.0, VMware introduced postgres as supported database for vCD. If you are planning to use postgres as DB, then you should install Postgres v 9.5 on a supported OS.

In our last Post I mentioned that I purposefully configured MSSQL as DB from my new vCD 9.0 installation, as I wanted to test the migration of vCDDB from MSSQL to Postgres. This post is focused on how to do so.

If you are new to postgres and do not know how to install it, then follow this blog for installation instructions which are pretty easy and straight forward.

Once you have installed postgres and started services, next is to create database for vCD. Follow below commands to do so

1: Create Database

postgres=# CREATE DATABASE vcloud;
CREATE DATABASE

1 2	postgres=# CREATE DATABASE vcloud; CREATE DATABASE

2: Verify presence of newly created database

postgres=# l
 List of databases
 Name | Owner | Encoding | Collate | Ctype | Access privileges
-----------+----------+----------+---------+-------+-----------------------
 postgres | postgres | UTF8 | C | C |
 template0 | postgres | UTF8 | C | C | =c/postgres +
 | | | | | postgres=CTc/postgres
 template1 | postgres | UTF8 | C | C | =c/postgres +
 | | | | | postgres=CTc/postgres
 vcloud | postgres | UTF8 | C | C |
(4 rows)

postgres=# l

List of databases

-----------+----------+----------+---------+-------+-----------------------

postgres | postgres | UTF8 | C | C |

template0 | postgres | UTF8 | C | C | =c/postgres +

template1 | postgres | UTF8 | C | C | =c/postgres +

vcloud | postgres | UTF8 | C | C |

(4 rows)

3: Create vCloud user and assign password to user

postgres=# create user vcloud;
CREATE ROLE

postgres=# alter user vcloud password 'Telstra@123';
ALTER ROLE

postgres=# create user vcloud;

CREATE ROLE

postgres=# alter user vcloud password 'Telstra@123';

ALTER ROLE

4: Enable the database owner to log in to the database

postgres=# alter role vcloud with login;
ALTER ROLE

1 2	postgres=# alter role vcloud with login; ALTER ROLE

5: Grant full permission to vCloud user to vCloud database

postgres=# grant all privileges on database vcloud to vcloud;
GRANT

1 2	postgres=# grant all privileges on database vcloud to vcloud; GRANT

6: Test the vcloud user access to database

postgres@vpostgre-mgmtdb-a:~> psql -d vcloud -U vcloud
psql.bin

vCloud Director 9.0 Single Cell Installation

Posted on 30-09-2017 by Manish Jha

vCD 9.0 was announced yesterday and in my last post I touch based on some of the new features that are included in this new release. In this post we will see how to install and configure vCD 9.0.

vCloud Director Hardware and Software Requirements

Before starting with vCloud director 9.0 installation, please make sure all hardware and software requirements are met. Instructions are laid out here

Installing and Configuring a vCloud Director Database

In my lab I am using MSSQL for vCD database. Although I wanted to try the installation with Postgres database, but I refrained myself from doing so as I wanted to test cell management utility for migrating vCD database from MSSQL to Postgres later.

Below script will be used in configuring the database. You have to make minor changes in the script to setup according to your infrastructure

USE [master]
GO
CREATE DATABASE [vcloud] ON PRIMARY
(NAME = N'vcloud', FILENAME = N'C:vcloud.mdf',

vCloud Director 9.0 Released

Posted on 30-09-2017 by Manish Jha

Yesterday VMware released vCloud Director 9.0 and this version of vCD brings many new things on table which customer’s were looking for some time. We will discuss about Whats new with this release. Vcloud Director 9.0 was first anoounced by VMware in VMworld 2017 on 28/08/2017.

The GA version of vCloud Director 9.0 is build 6681978 and is available for download for service providers from here

Whats new with this release?

Below new features are in this release:

New HTML5 based UI which is fast (same like HTML client for vSphere). However, the old Flex based UI is still available.
New VM lifecycle workflows: VM creation task is now completed in one screen as opposed to maximum of seven in previous releases of vCD.
Multisite management: If a tenant has workloads running across different Org vDC’s and in more than once vCloud Director instance, then tenant can access all of them via single portal.

VLAN tagging and PVLAN’s in vSphere 6

Posted on 29-09-2017 by Manish Jha

VLAN’s enable a single physical LAN segment to be further isolated so that groups of ports are isolated from one another as if they were on physically different segments. Using VLAN’s, administrator get following advantages:

Integrates the host into a pre-existing environment
Isolate and secure network traffic
Reduce network traffic congestion

In a physical environment, servers are equipped with dedicated physical NIC that are in turn connected to a physical switch. VLANs in physical world are usually controlled by setting the VLAN ID on the physical switch port and then setting the server’s IP address to correspond to that NIC’s VLAN.

In a virtual environment, dedicating a physical NIC (pNIC) to each VM that resides on the host is not possible. In reality, a physical NIC of the Esxi host service many VMs, and these VM’s may need to be connected to different VLANs. So the method of setting a VLAN ID on the physical switch port doesn’t work.… Read More

Switch Discovery Protocols

Posted on 28-09-2017 by Manish Jha

In physical networking space, switches are connected to one or more adjacent switch forming a web of switches which can talk to each other. This web of switches is referred as “neighbourhood of switching”.

Virtual switches (standard or vDS) are connected to these physical switches via physical uplinks. These uplinks are terminating at a particular port of the physical switch and that port itself have some characteristics like a VLAN ID etc defined there. These characteristic values are not exposed to virtual switches by default.

What I mean by this is by just looking at virtual switch diagram in vSphere client, we can’t tell which uplink of vSwitch is connected to which port of physical switch, or what is the make and model of backend physical switch.

Switch discovery protocols allow vSphere administrators to determine which physical switch port is connected to a given vSphere standard switch or vSphere distributed switch.… Read More

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