What’s New vSphere 6 vBrownBag

I presented a What’s New in vSphere 6 presentation on last week’s US vBrownBag podcast.
Below is a copy of the recording and deck for those interested.

Home Lab Tidbits #1

Home labs are really starting to pick up some pace with many vendors tailoring products and solutions directly to this emerging market. It’s becoming hard to keep up with what’s coming out. Of those releases, what is actually useful for your home lab? This is an experimental aggregation post that may or may not continue, depending on feedback.

Compute

  • ASRock have a new motherboard, the EPC612D8A-TB this may well rival the Home Lab favorites from SuperMicro.
  • Intel have announced their SoC for Enterprise, the Xeon D. Lets hope some inexpensive Home Lab components are the result.
  • Wanting to build a new system to host lots and lots of storage? The Haswell-E based ASRock X99 has 18 on-board SATA ports.

Storage

  • In the market for a new NAS? SmallNetBuilder has a guide that will help you decide which is best for you.
  • Both Asustor and Western Digital have a couple of new NAS units with decent performance.
  • ServeTheHome benchmarked the inexpensive 240GB Intel DC S3500 SSD and the considerably more expensive 1.6TB Toshiba PX03SNB160.
  • If you want some SLC enterprise class storage, Hitachi have a 100GB SSD that has great read and write sequential performance.
  • Synology keeps their entry bar low with the DS115j.

Network

  • Netgear have a competitor in the cheap 10GbE switch segment. ZyXel have a new 12-port 10GbE switch, the XS1920-12.

Software

  • NAS4Free is pretty easy to get up and running in 5 minutes if you want roll your own shared storage.
  • A little product called vSphere 6 went GA this week.

Upgrading vCenter 5.5 -> 6

Earlier this year I recorded a video for the VMUG 2015 Virtual Event. As is often the case with online webinar platforms, the quality of the recording wasn’t as good as we’ve come to expect with the prevalence of online video these days. So, I posted the video (embedded below) to my YouTube channel, just like I did last year. Since that recording I learned a few things thanks to a couple of my colleagues that I want to point out.

Firstly, I mentioned that VSAN is using the VMware acquired Virsto file-system. This is incorrect. While VSAN in vSphere 6 does have improved sparseness and caching capabilities it’s not using Virsto. There is also mention of the 256 datastore limitation being removed by VVOLs, this is also incorrect.

Secondly, but much more exciting, VMware have announced the long awaited Windows vCenter to Linux vCenter Virtual Appliance Fling. My buddy William Lam (of www.virtuallyghetto.com fame) is pretty excited about this one! I thought it particularly relevant for those watching this video as I had a number of questions at the Virtual Event around this very topic. So head over and grab the fling. I might just do another video of what it looks like to migrate the AutoLab vCenter to a vCSA!

AutoLab Version 2.0 Released

It has been a while, but the day has arrived. AutoLab version 2.0 is available for download. This version doesn’t support a new vSphere release since VMware hasn’t shipped one. AutoLab 2.0 is more of a maintenance and usability release.

The biggest feature is adding support for Windows Server 2012R2 as the platform for the domain controller and vCentre VMs. Naturally you should make sure the version of vSphere you deploy is supported on top of the version of Windows Server you use.

I have also removed the tagged VLANs which makes it easier to run multiple AutoLab instances on one ESXi server or to extend one AutoLab across a couple of physical servers if you only have smaller machines.

I’ve also added the ability to customize the password for the administrator accounts, which helps lock down an AutoLab environment.

Go ahead and download the new build from the usual download page and get stuck in. If you haven’t used AutoLab before make sure to read the deployment guide.

Synology DSM Virtual Machine

Introduction

Synology have made a name for themselves over the past few years as one of the preferred home lab NAS solutions. In particular, they were one of the first consumer vendors to support VAAI in VMware environments and also one of the first to support SSD caching. If you ever wanted to checkout their DSM 5.0 software without purchasing any hardware, the following outlines how you can spin up their DSM software in a VM for testing purposes. Obviously this is not going to give you an exact comparison to hardware, but it’s a great way to test it in your lab. If you want to skip the “build” section and just spin one of these up right away, simply download and import this OVF file to your virtual environment and move on to “Installing the DSM software”.

How to Build the DSM Virtual Machine

There are a number of quick steps that you’ll need to perform to be able to spin up your own DSM VM. First of all, you will want a couple of bits of software:

Once you have all the tools, you need to modify the nonoboot image boot loader.

  1. Using WinImage, open the nanoboot file and find syslinux.cfg
  2. Extract and edit the syslinux.cfg file, find the lines that start with “kernel /ZImage” and add the following to the end of the line: rmmod ata_piix
  3. Save the cfg file and inject it back to the nanoboot image overriding the exiting file.
  4. Next use Starwind to convert the nanoboot IMG file to an IDE pre-allocated VMDK
  5. Create a new VM and use these VMDKs as an “existing hard drive” IDE 0:0.
  6. Set the disk to “independent non-persistent”. Continue with Step 12 below

Installing the the DSM software

After you have a working bootable VM that emulates Synology hardware, its time to install the DSM software itself. You can add additional hardware to the VM at any time after this point (SCSI Disks, NICs, vCPU or Memory)

    1. Upgrade / DowngradeAdd SCSI based virtual hard disks to the VM for how much space you would like available for the virtual NAS
    2. Attach the network card in the VM to the correct network. DHCP must be enabled on the network.
    3. Power on the VM
    4. Select the 3rd option in the boot menu labeled “Upgrade / Downgrade”
    5. Once the IP is shown, use a web browser to the IP address listed on the console
    6. Follow the onscreen instructions to complete the installation wizard with the following options:
      • Install the DSM version from disk (SD214 DSM 5.0 4482)
      • Do not create a Synology Hybrid volume
    7. After some time the VM will reboot, and then power off.
    8. Power the VM back on and you will have a working Synology DSM Virtual Machine.

The guys at xpenology.com have a whole site dedicated to this stuff.

Always Invest in Power

I had a bit of a problem over the last 8-9 months with 2 Supermicro X9SRH-7TF systems and the cheap and cheerful 10G Netgear XS708E switch. Somewhat sporadically (weeks would go by), the onboard X540 based 10G NICs would disconnect and the motherboard would require a full power cut (PSU switch off/on) before they would re-link again. If you follow me on twitter you would have heard numerous rants.

To begin with, I thought it was just one of the boards, so it was sent it back to Supermicro (no fault found) but then the other one started doing it too. Fast forward a few months and the servers were moved from 220v power to 110v (Australia -> USA move)… suddenly the problem disappeared. I thought it must have been some dodgy voltage step-down issue, but I didn’t think much more of it. I was simply happy the issue had been resolved and the HA wasn’t working overtime starting up failed VMs.

A couple of weeks ago, the servers were each upgraded with an Icy Dock MB994SP 4S to enable VSAN. Some older HP 10K 146GB SAS drives (with Samsung EVO SSDs) were used with the onboard LSI 2308. As soon as the servers were powered up, the NICs once again started disconnecting. At once I knew it must be a power issue, and I upgraded the PSUs in both servers. While calculating the total power draw, the originals (430W) should have been enough, but I now have plenty more in reserve (750W).

The moral of the story? Power Supplies are a relatively cheap component within your home lab system, so get one a little better than your current needs.

Lab Hardware Guides – Q3 2014

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