ESXi : How to mask storage device causing some issues

I have heard about the issue with ESXi 6 Update 2 and HP 3PAR storage where VVOLs are enabled. I have been told that the issue is caused by issuing unsupported SCSI command to PE LUN (256). PE stands for Protocol Endpoint and it is VVOL technical LUN for data path between ESXi and remote storage system.

Observed symptoms:

• ESX 6 Update 2 – issues (ESXi disconnects from vCenter, console is very slow)
• Hosts may take a long time to reconnect to vCenter after reboot or hosts may enter a "Not Responding" state in vCenter Server
• Storage-related tasks such as HBA rescan may take a very long time to complete
• I have been told that ESX 6 Update 1 doesn't experience such issues (there are entries are in log file but no other symptoms occur)

Below is a snippet from a log file ..

 2016-05-18T11:31:27.319Z cpu1:242967)WARNING: NMP: nmpDeviceAttemptFailover:603: Retry world failover device "naa.2ff70002ac0150c3" - issuing command 0x43a657470fc0  
 2016-05-18T11:31:27.320Z cpu31:33602)WARNING: NMP: nmpCompleteRetryForPath:352: Retry cmd 0x28 (0x43a657470fc0) to dev "naa.2ff70002ac0150c3" failed on path "vmhba0:C0:T2:L256" H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x5 0x25 0x0.  
 2016-05-18T11:31:27.320Z cpu31:33602)WARNING: NMP: nmp_PathDetermineFailure:2973: Cmd (0x28) PDL error (0x5/0x25/0x0) - path vmhba0:C0:T2:L256 device naa.2ff70002ac0150c3 - triggering path failover  
 2016-05-18T11:31:27.320Z cpu31:33602)WARNING: NMP: nmpCompleteRetryForPath:382: Logical device "naa.2ff70002ac0150c3": awaiting fast path state update before retrying failed command again.  

Possible workarounds

• ESXi hostd restart helps therefore SSH to ESXi hosts was enabled for quick resolution in case of problem
• LUN masking of LUN 256

UPDATE 2016-09-30: There is most probably another workaround. Changing the Disk.MaxLUN parameter on ESXi Hosts as described in VMware KB 1998

Final solution

• Application of HP 3PAR firmware patch (unfortunately patch is not available for current firmware thus firmware upgrade has to be planned and executed)
• Investigation of root cause why ESXi 6 Update 2 is more sensitive then ESXi 6 Update 1

Immediate steps

• Application of workarounds mentioned above  

HOME LAB EXERCISE
I have tested in my home lab how to mask particular LUN on ESXi host just to be sure I know how to do it.

Below is quick solution for impatient readers.

Let's sat we have following device with following path.

• Device: naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186
• Path: vmhba36:C0:T0:L1

LUN Masking
esxcli storage core claimrule add -P MASK_PATH -r 500 -t location -A vmhba36 -C 0 -T 0 -L 1
esxcli storage core claimrule load
esxcli storage core claiming reclaim -d naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186

LUN Unmasking
esxcli storage core claimrule remove --rule 500
esxcli storage core claimrule load
esxcli storage core claiming unclaim --type=path --path=vmhba36:C0:T0:L1
esxcli storage core claimrule run

... continue reading for details.

LUN MASKING DETAILS
Exact LUN masking procedure is documented in vSphere 6 Documentation here. It is also documented in these KB articles 1009449 and 1014953.

List storage devices

 [root@esx02:~] esxcli storage core device list  
 naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186  
   Display Name: FreeNAS iSCSI Disk (naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186)  
   Has Settable Display Name: true  
   Size: 10240  
   Device Type: Direct-Access  
   Multipath Plugin: NMP  
   Devfs Path: /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186  
   Vendor: FreeNAS  
   Model: iSCSI Disk  
   Revision: 0123  
   SCSI Level: 6  
   Is Pseudo: false  
   Status: degraded  
   Is RDM Capable: true  
   Is Local: false  
   Is Removable: false  
   Is SSD: true  
   Is VVOL PE: false  
   Is Offline: false  
   Is Perennially Reserved: false  
   Queue Full Sample Size: 0  
   Queue Full Threshold: 0  
   Thin Provisioning Status: yes  
   Attached Filters:  
   VAAI Status: supported  
   Other UIDs: vml.010001000030303530353661386131633830300000695343534920  
   Is Shared Clusterwide: true  
   Is Local SAS Device: false  
   Is SAS: false  
   Is USB: false  
   Is Boot USB Device: false  
   Is Boot Device: false  
   Device Max Queue Depth: 128  
   No of outstanding IOs with competing worlds: 32  
   Drive Type: unknown  
   RAID Level: unknown  
   Number of Physical Drives: unknown  
   Protection Enabled: false  
   PI Activated: false  
   PI Type: 0  
   PI Protection Mask: NO PROTECTION  
   Supported Guard Types: NO GUARD SUPPORT  
   DIX Enabled: false  
   DIX Guard Type: NO GUARD SUPPORT  
   Emulated DIX/DIF Enabled: false
  
 naa.6589cfc000000ac12355fe604028bf21  
   Display Name: FreeNAS iSCSI Disk (naa.6589cfc000000ac12355fe604028bf21)  
   Has Settable Display Name: true  
   Size: 10240  
   Device Type: Direct-Access  
   Multipath Plugin: NMP  
   Devfs Path: /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6589cfc000000ac12355fe604028bf21  
   Vendor: FreeNAS  
   Model: iSCSI Disk  
   Revision: 0123  
   SCSI Level: 6  
   Is Pseudo: false  
   Status: degraded  
   Is RDM Capable: true  
   Is Local: false  
   Is Removable: false  
   Is SSD: true  
   Is VVOL PE: false  
   Is Offline: false  
   Is Perennially Reserved: false  
   Queue Full Sample Size: 0  
   Queue Full Threshold: 0  
   Thin Provisioning Status: yes  
   Attached Filters:  
   VAAI Status: supported  
   Other UIDs: vml.010002000030303530353661386131633830310000695343534920  
   Is Shared Clusterwide: true  
   Is Local SAS Device: false  
   Is SAS: false  
   Is USB: false  
   Is Boot USB Device: false  
   Is Boot Device: false  
   Device Max Queue Depth: 128  
   No of outstanding IOs with competing worlds: 32  
   Drive Type: unknown  
   RAID Level: unknown  
   Number of Physical Drives: unknown  
   Protection Enabled: false  
   PI Activated: false  
   PI Type: 0  
   PI Protection Mask: NO PROTECTION  
   Supported Guard Types: NO GUARD SUPPORT  
   DIX Enabled: false  
   DIX Guard Type: NO GUARD SUPPORT  
   Emulated DIX/DIF Enabled: false  

So we have two device with following NAA IDs

• naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186
• naa.6589cfc000000ac12355fe604028bf21

Now let's list paths of both of my iSCSI devices

[root@esx02:~] esxcli storage nmp path list
iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:esx02-096fde38-00023d000001,iqn.2005-10.org.freenas.ctl:test,t,257-naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186
   Runtime Name: vmhba36:C0:T0:L1
   Device: naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186
   Device Display Name: FreeNAS iSCSI Disk (naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186)
   Group State: active
   Array Priority: 0
   Storage Array Type Path Config: {TPG_id=1,TPG_state=AO,RTP_id=3,RTP_health=UP}
   Path Selection Policy Path Config: {current path; rank: 0}

iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:esx02-096fde38-00023d000001,iqn.2005-10.org.freenas.ctl:test,t,257-naa.6589cfc000000ac12355fe604028bf21
   Runtime Name: vmhba36:C0:T0:L2
   Device: naa.6589cfc000000ac12355fe604028bf21
   Device Display Name: FreeNAS iSCSI Disk (naa.6589cfc000000ac12355fe604028bf21)
   Group State: active
   Array Priority: 0
   Storage Array Type Path Config: {TPG_id=1,TPG_state=AO,RTP_id=3,RTP_health=UP}
   Path Selection Policy Path Config: {current path; rank: 0}

Let's mask iSCSI devices exposed as a LUN 1.
So our path we want to mask is vmhba36:C0:T0:L1 and device UID is naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186

So let's create masking rule of path above. In this particular case we have just a single path because it is local device. In real environment we have usually multiple paths and all paths should be masked.

 esxcli storage core claimrule add -P MASK_PATH -r 500 -t location -A vmhba36 -C 0 -T 0 -L 1
 esxcli storage core claimrule load  

We can list our claim rules to see the result

 [root@esx02:~] esxcli storage core claimrule list  
 Rule Class  Rule Class  Type    Plugin   Matches                  XCOPY Use Array Reported Values XCOPY Use Multiple Segments XCOPY Max Transfer Size  
 ---------- ----- ------- --------- --------- ---------------------------------------- ------------------------------- --------------------------- -----------------------  
 MP       0 runtime transport NMP    transport=usb                            false            false            0  
 MP       1 runtime transport NMP    transport=sata                           false            false            0  
 MP       2 runtime transport NMP    transport=ide                            false            false            0  
 MP       3 runtime transport NMP    transport=block                           false            false            0  
 MP       4 runtime transport NMP    transport=unknown                          false            false            0  
 MP      101 runtime vendor   MASK_PATH vendor=DELL model=Universal Xport                  false            false            0  
 MP      101 file   vendor   MASK_PATH vendor=DELL model=Universal Xport                  false            false            0  
 MP      500 runtime location  MASK_PATH adapter=vmhba36 channel=0 target=0 lun=1              false            false            0  
 MP      500 file   location  MASK_PATH adapter=vmhba36 channel=0 target=0 lun=1              false            false            0  
 MP     65535 runtime vendor   NMP    vendor=* model=*                          false            false            0  

We can see that new claim rule (500) is in configuration file (/etc/vmware/esx.com) and also loaded in runtime.

However, to really mask our particular device without ESXi host reboot we have to reclaim device

 [root@esx02:~] esxcli storage core claiming reclaim -d naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186  

The particular device disappear from ESXi host immediately. ESXi host reboot is not needed.
So we are done. Particular device is not visible to ESXi host anymore.

Note: I was unsuccessful when I was testing LUN masking with local device. Therefore I assume that LUN masking works only with remote disks (iSCSI, Fibre Channel). 

LUN UNMASKING
Just in case you would like to unmask device and use it again here is the procedure.

Let's start with removing claimrules for our previously masked path.

 [root@esx02:~] esxcli storage core claimrule remove --rule 500  
 [root@esx02:~] esxcli storage core claimrule list  
 Rule Class  Rule Class  Type    Plugin   Matches                  XCOPY Use Array Reported Values XCOPY Use Multiple Segments XCOPY Max Transfer Size  
 ---------- ----- ------- --------- --------- ---------------------------------------- ------------------------------- --------------------------- -----------------------  
 MP       0 runtime transport NMP    transport=usb                            false            false            0  
 MP       1 runtime transport NMP    transport=sata                           false            false            0  
 MP       2 runtime transport NMP    transport=ide                            false            false            0  
 MP       3 runtime transport NMP    transport=block                           false            false            0  
 MP       4 runtime transport NMP    transport=unknown                          false            false            0  
 MP      101 runtime vendor   MASK_PATH vendor=DELL model=Universal Xport                  false            false            0  
 MP      101 file   vendor   MASK_PATH vendor=DELL model=Universal Xport                  false            false            0  
 MP      500 runtime location  MASK_PATH adapter=vmhba36 channel=0 target=0 lun=1              false            false            0  
 MP     65535 runtime vendor   NMP    vendor=* model=*                          false            false            0  
 [root@esx02:~]   

You can see that rule is removed from file configuration but it is still running. We have to re-load claimrules from file to runtime.

 [root@esx02:~] esxcli storage core claimrule load  
 [root@esx02:~] esxcli storage core claimrule list  
 Rule Class  Rule Class  Type    Plugin   Matches              XCOPY Use Array Reported Values XCOPY Use Multiple Segments XCOPY Max Transfer Size  
 ---------- ----- ------- --------- --------- --------------------------------- ------------------------------- --------------------------- -----------------------  
 MP       0 runtime transport NMP    transport=usb                        false            false            0  
 MP       1 runtime transport NMP    transport=sata                        false            false            0  
 MP       2 runtime transport NMP    transport=ide                        false            false            0  
 MP       3 runtime transport NMP    transport=block                       false            false            0  
 MP       4 runtime transport NMP    transport=unknown                      false            false            0  
 MP      101 runtime vendor   MASK_PATH vendor=DELL model=Universal Xport              false            false            0  
 MP      101 file   vendor   MASK_PATH vendor=DELL model=Universal Xport              false            false            0  
 MP     65535 runtime vendor   NMP    vendor=* model=*                       false            false            0  
 [root@esx02:~]   

Here we go. Now there is no rule with id 500.

But the device is still not visible and we cannot execute command

esxcli storage core claiming reclaim -d naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186

because such device is not visible to ESXi host. We mask it, right? So it is exactly how it should behave.

ESXi host would probably help but can we do it without ESXi host reboot?
The answer is yes we can.
We have to unclaim the path to our device and re-run claim rules.

 esxcli storage core claiming unclaim --type=path --path=vmhba36:C0:T0:L1  
 esxcli storage core claimrule run  

and now we can see both paths to iSCSI LUNs again.

 [root@esx02:~] esxcli storage nmp path list  
 iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:esx02-096fde38-00023d000001,iqn.2005-10.org.freenas.ctl:test,t,257-naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186  
   Runtime Name: vmhba36:C0:T0:L1  
   Device: naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186  
   Device Display Name: FreeNAS iSCSI Disk (naa.6589cfc000000bf5e731ffc99ec35186)  
   Group State: active  
   Array Priority: 0  
   Storage Array Type Path Config: {TPG_id=1,TPG_state=AO,RTP_id=3,RTP_health=UP}  
   Path Selection Policy Path Config: {current path; rank: 0}  
 iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:esx02-096fde38-00023d000001,iqn.2005-10.org.freenas.ctl:test,t,257-naa.6589cfc000000ac12355fe604028bf21  
   Runtime Name: vmhba36:C0:T0:L2  
   Device: naa.6589cfc000000ac12355fe604028bf21  
   Device Display Name: FreeNAS iSCSI Disk (naa.6589cfc000000ac12355fe604028bf21)  
   Group State: active  
   Array Priority: 0  
   Storage Array Type Path Config: {TPG_id=1,TPG_state=AO,RTP_id=3,RTP_health=UP}  
   Path Selection Policy Path Config: {current path; rank: 0}  

Hope this helps to other vmware users having a need for LUN masking / unmasking.

Storage DRS Design Considerations

This blog post follows blog post "VMware vSphere SDRS - test plan of SDRS initial placement" and summarizes several facts having an impact on SDRS design decisions. If you want to see results of several SDRS tests I did in my home lab read my previous blog post.

SDRS design considerations:

• SDRS Initial Placement algorithm does NOT take VM swap file capacity into account. However, Subsequent Rebalance Calculations are based on free space on particular datastores therefore if Virtual Machines are in PowerOn state and swap files exist then it is considered because VM swap file usage will be decreased from datastore total free space and it has an impact on space load. Space load formula is [space load] = [total consumed space on the datastore] / [datastore capacity]
• Storage Space threshold is just a threshold (soft limit) used by SDRS for balancing and defragment. It is not a hard limit. SDRS is trying to keep free space on datastores based on space threshold but SDRS doesn't guarantee you will have always some amount of free space in datastores. See. Test-3 in my SDRS test plan here [6].
• SDRS defragmentation works but there can be some cases when initial placement fails even the storage was freed up and there will be free continuous space in some datastore after defragmentation. See. Test-2 in my SDRS test plan here [6]. That's up to the component which does provisioning. It is important to understand how provisioning to datastore cluster really works. A lot of people think that Datastore Cluster behaves like a giant datastore. It is true from high-level view (abstracted view) but in reality Datastore Cluster is nothing else then just a group of single datastores where SDRS is "just" a scheduler on top of Datastore Cluster datastores. You can imagine a scheduler as a placement engine which prepares placement recommendations for initial placement and continuous balancing. That means that other software components (C# Client, Web Client, PowerCLI, vRealize Automation, vCloud Director, etc) are responsible for initial placement provisioning and SDRS give them recommendations where is the best place to put a new storage object (vmdk file or VM config file). Here [8] is the proof of my statement.
• When SDRS is configured to consider I/O metrics for load balancing then it is considered also during initial placement. Please, do not mix up SDRS I/O metrics and SIOC. These are two different things even SDRS I/O metrics are leveraging normalized latency calculated by SIOC.
• Q: Do I need to use SDRS I/O metrics for load balancing? A: It depends on your physical storage system (disk array). If you have disk array with modern storage architecture then you will have most probably all datastores  (aka LUNs, volumes) on single physical disk pool. In that case, it doesn't make sense to load balance (do storage vMotion in case of I/O contention) between datastores because it will always end up in same physical spindles anyway and on top of that it will generate additional storage workload. The same is true for initial placement. If you have your datastores on different physical spindles then it can help. This is typically used on storage systems using RAID groups which is not very common nowadays.
• SDRS calculation is done on vmdks, not the whole Virtual Machine. But affinity rules (keep together) tend to keep the vmdks together making it similar behavior as if the was VM. By default, virtual machine files are kept together in the working directory of the virtual machine. If the virtual machine needs to be migrated, all the files inside the virtual machines’ working directory are moved. However, if the default affinity rule is disabled (see. Screenshot 1), Storage DRS will move the working directory and virtual disks separately allowing Storage DRS to distribute the virtual disk files on a more granular level.
• Q: When and how often is SDRS rebalancing kicked in? A: Rebalancing happens 1) at regular interval (default 8 hours - it can be changed see Screenshot 2); 2) when threshold violation is detected like above; 3) user requests a configuration change 4) API call like clicking run SDRS via a client. 
• Multiple VM provisioning can behave differently - less deterministically - because of other SDRS calculation factors (I/O load, capacity usage trend) and also because of particular provisioning workflow and exact timing when SDRS recommendation is called and when datastore space is really consumed. Recall that datastore reported free capacity is one of the main factors for next SDRS recommendations.
• From vSphere 6.0 SDRS is integrated with other relevant technologies like SDRS VASA awareness (array-based thin-provisioning, deduplication, auto-tiering, snapshot, replication), Site Recovery Manager (consistency groups and protection groups considerations), vSphere Replication (replica placement recommendations), Storage Policy Based Management (moves just between same compliant VM storage policies). For further details read reference [9].

The general solution to overcome challenges highlighted above (architects call it risk mitigation) is to have "enough" free space on each datastore. Enough free storage space per datastore gives some more flexibility to SDRS algorithm. What is "enough" and how to achieve it is out of the scope of this blog post but think about following hints

• Thin Provisioning on physical storage. See. Frank Denneman's note here [2] about thin provisioning alarm which should be considered by SDRS algorithm. I'm writing should because I had no chance to test it.
• VVOLs, VSAN - I believe that one big VVOLs datastore (storage container) eliminate the need for datastore free space considerations.

But don't forget that there are always other considerations with potential impacts to your specific design so think holistically and use critical thinking during all design decisions.

Last but not least - I highly encourage you to study carefully the book "VMware vSphere Clustering Deepdive 5.1" to be familiar with basic SDRS algorithm and terminology.

Screenshots:

Screenshot 1: SDRS - Default VM affinity 

Screenshot 2: SDRS - Default imbalance check is 8 hours. It can be changed to X minutes, hours, days 

Videos:

Video 1: VMware vSphere SDRS VM provisioning process 

Relevant resources:

1. Frank Denneman : Storage DRS initial placement and datastore cluster defragmentation
2. Frank Denneman : Storage DRS Initial placement workflow
3. Frank Denneman : Impact of Intra VM affinity rules on Storage DRS
4. Frank Denneman : SDRS out of space avoidance
5. Duncan Epping, Frank Denneman : VMware vSphere Clustering Deepdive 5.1
6. David Pasek : VMware vSphere SDRS - test plan of SDRS initial placement
7. VMware : Ignore Storage DRS Affinity Rules for Maintenance Mode
8. David Pasek : VMware vSphere SDRS VM provisioning process 
9. Duncan Epping : What is new for Storage DRS in vSphere 6.0?
10. VMware KB : Storage DRS FAQ 

VMware vSphere SDRS - test plan of SDRS initial placement

VMware vSphere Storage DRS (aka SDRS) stands for Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler. It continuously balances storage space usage and storage I/O load while avoiding resource bottlenecks to meet application service levels.

Lab environment:
5x10GB Datastores formed into Datastore Cluster with SDRS enabled.
It is configured to balance based on storage space usage and also I/O load.

• Storage Space threshold is 1 GB
• I/O latency threshold is kept on default 15 ms.
• Each "empty" datastore has real capacity 9.75 GB where real free capacity is 8.89 GB because 882 MB is used. 

You can see configuration details on screenshot below.  

Capacity of one particular 10 GB datastore is depicted below.

Used space (882 MB) is occupied by following system files (.sf) ...

In VMFS 5 every datastore gets its own hidden files to save the file-system structure.

Test 1

Test description: Does SDRS Initial Placement algorithm take into account VM swap file capacity?

Test prerequisites:

• All 5 datastores in datastore cluster are empty
• That's mean that each datastore has free capacity 8.89 GB
• Provisioned VM doesn't have any RAM reservation

Test steps:

• Deploy Virtual Machine with 4 GB RAM and 8 GB Disk manually (through Web Client)
• Start deployed Virtual Machine
• Observe behavior 

Test expectations:

• I want to test if swap file is considered during SDRS initial placement
• We have only 8.89 GB free space on datatastores therefore if VM swap file is considered new VM with 8GB disk and 4 GB RAM wont be provisioned because we would need 12 GB space on some datastore which is not our case.
• In other words, if provisioning fails then we will proof that SDRS doesn't take VM swap file into account.

Test screenshots:

Deployed Virtual Machine.

VM PowerOn Failure 

Test Result:

• Virtual machine was successfully provisioned and 8GB was decreased from Datastore 5 available space.
• Virtual machine power on action failed because of not enough storage space for 4 GB swap file. This is expected behavior in case that SDRS doesn't take VM swap into account.

Test Summary:

• We have tested that SDRS Initial Placement algorithm does NOT take VM swap file capacity into account.
• Virtual Machine memory (RAM) reservation would have impact on such test because if VM has for example 100% memory reservation it doesn't need any disk space for VM swap.

Test 2

Test description: How SDRS defragmentation is efficient when datastore cluster is running out of storage space?

Test prerequisites:

• 4 datastores in datastore cluster are almost full
• 1 datastore (Datastore4) has 7.58 GB free space
• In one datastore (Datastore5) we have virtual machine (test1_big) having 8GB disk

Test steps:

• Clone Virtual Machine (test1_big) to datstore cluster (through Web Client)
• Observe behavior 

Test expectations:

• SDRS will free up Datastore4 to have enough space for clone of virtual machine (test1_big)
• Provisioning of virtual machine clone will be successful 

Test screenshots:

Before SDRS defragmentation

After SDRS defragmentation and clone provisioning

Test Result:

• SDRS freed up Datastore4 as expected
• Provisioning of virtual machine clone FAILED because of insufficient disk space on Datastore4. 
• That's unexpected behavior because Datastore4 is empty (thanks to SDRS defragmentation) and another machine with same configuration was successfully provisioned on Datastore5.

Test Summary:

• SDRS successfully freed up the only datastore where virtual machine clone can be placed but VM clone deployment started before storage vMotion finished therefore clone provisioning failed.
• SDRS defragmentation works but there can be some cases when initial placement fails even the storage was freed up and there will be free continuous space in some datastore after defragmentation.
• It is important to understand how VM provisioning to datastore cluster really works. Datastore Cluster is nothing else then the group of single datastores where SDRS is "just" a scheduler on top of Datastore Cluster. You can imagine a scheduler as a placement engine which prepare placement recommendations for initial placement and continuous balancing. That means that other software component (C# Client, Web Client, PowerCLI, vRealize Automation, vCloud Director, etc) is responsible for initial placement provisioning and SDRS give them recommendations where is the best place to put a new storage objects (vmdk file or VM config file).
• In other words, Initial VM provisioning doesn’t have nothing to do with SDRS initial placement. VM initial provisioning process is managed by vSphere Client, vRA, vRO, PowerCLI or other software component over vSphere API. SDRS is just a placement engine gives recommendation where is the best place at the moment when is asked for recommendations. Provisioning process selects one particular SDRS recommendation and continue with provisioning (API method ApplyStorageDrsRecommendation_Task). However, in the mean time there can be some other software doing VM provisioning and selected datastore can be filled by somebody else. There is always some probability for vm provisioning failure and it is exactly where good vSphere / Storage design has crucial role to decrease probability of provisioning failure. 

Test 3

Test description: How is SDRS initial placement balancing among different datastores?

Test prerequisites:

• Storage Space threshold is 1 GB
• I/O latency threshold is kept on default 15 ms.
• Each "empty" datastore has real capacity 9.75 GB where real free capacity is 8.89 GB because 882 MB is used. 
• Usage of PowerCLI script to provision multiple VMs. PowerCLI script is available here.

Test steps:

• Run PowerCLI script to generate 50 virtual machines with following specification (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 1GB Disk - thick) in to datastore cluster with SDRS enabled.
• Observe behavior

Test expectations:

• We have datastore cluster with 5 datastores each having 8.89 GB (9,103 MB) available storage.
• We are deploying VMs with 1000 MB each.
• It is deployed in not power on state - so swap file doesn't need to be considered. 
• Therefore we would expect to end up with 45 VMs balanced in round robin fashion across 5 datastores.  

Test screenshots:

Single datastore capacity

PowerCLI Automated Provisioning.

Datastore free space after automatic sequential provisioning

Test Result:

• 45 VMs was successfully provisioned and 46th-50th VM failed because of "Insufficient disk space on datastore 'Datastore1'." This was expected behavior.
• Following VMs are provisioned on datastores

• Datastore 1: TEST-05, TEST-06, TEST-15, TEST-20, TEST-21, TEST-30, TEST-31, TEST-40, TEST-45 

• Datastore 2: TEST-04, TEST-10, TEST-11, TEST-19, TEST-25, TEST-26, TEST-35, TEST-36, TEST-44

• Datastore 3: TEST-03, TEST-09, TEST-14, TEST-18, TEST-24, TEST-29, TEST-34, TEST-39, TEST-43

• Datastore 4: TEST-02, TEST-08, TEST-13, TEST-17, TEST-23, TEST-28, TEST-33, TEST-38, TEST-42

• Datastore 5: TEST-01, TEST-07, TEST-12, TEST-16, TEST-22, TEST-27, TEST-32, TEST-37, TEST-41

Test Summary: Test passed as expected. Only few details are worth to mention.

• I would expect VMs evenly distributed across datastores.  Recall that we are using artificial sequence provisioning of 1GB vDisks per VM. I would expect VMs TEST-01, TEST-06, TEST-11, TEST-16, TEST-21, TEST-26, TEST-31, TEST-36, TEST-41 on Datastore 5. And similar VM numbering on other datastores. But at the end of the day it doesn't seems to be a big deal.
• Please, note that I observed that different provisioning runs can end-up with slightly different machine placement. I have suspicious that it is because other factors (I/O load, storage usage trend) then are also considered in SDRS algorithm.
• Datastore free space is 103 MB on all datastores. Recall that we have Storage Space threshold set to 1 GB. That's expected behavior. Storage Space threshold is just a threshold (soft limit) used by SDRS for balancing and defragment. 

Test 4

Test description: Will be new VM provisioned to the datastore with the biggest frees space?

Test prerequisites:

• Storage Space threshold is 1 GB
• I/O latency threshold is kept on default 15 ms.
• One datastore (Datastore1) is "empty" has real capacity 9.5 GB where real free capacity is 8.64 GB because 882 MB is used. 
• One datastore (Datastore2) has 5.71 GB free capacity.
• All other datastores (Datastore3, Datastore4, Datastore5) are almost full having only 848 MB empty.

Test steps:

• Usage of vSphere Web Client to provision one VM with 2GB disk into Datastore Cluster.
• Observe behavior. We are interested where new VM will be placed.

Test expectations:

• We expect that new VM disk will be placed on Datastore1 because there is the biggest free (available) space.

Test screenshots:

Datastore cluster capacity before VM provisioning.

Datastore cluster capacity after VM provisioning.

Test Result:

• New virtual machine was provisioned into Datastore1 where was the bigest available storage capacity.

Test Summary: Initial placement behaves as expected. New VM is placed to the datastore with less used space. However, we should be aware that this test was done just for single VM provisioning. Multiple VM provisioning can behaves differently because of other SDRS calculation factors (I/O load, capacity usage trend) and also because of particular provisioning workflow and exact timing when SDRS recommendation is called and when datastore space is really consumed for next SDRS recommendations.

Next steps

See blog post "Storage DRS Design Considerations".

And as always, any comment is appreciated.

ESXi 6 - manual partitioning for multiple VMFS filesystems on single disk device

I have to test SDRS initial placement exact behavior (blog post here) therefore I need multiple VMFS datastores to form an Datastore Cluster with SDRS. Unfortunately, I'm constraint with storage resources in my home lab therefore I would like to use one local 220GB SSD to simulate multiple VMFS datastores.

Warning: This is not recommended practice for productional systems. It is recommended to have single partition (LUN) per single device.

I did not find GUI way how to create multiple partitions per single disks therefore I used CLI.

You cannot use old good fdisk for VMFS partitions. Instead PartedUtil has to be used because of GPT. PartedUtil is included in ESXi so you can login to ESXi over SSH and use partedUtil.

Note: It is worth to mention that you can have maximally 16 partitions in GUID Partition Table (GPT) in ESXi 6. This is what I have tested. When I tried to create 17 partitions the partedUtil failed with message - "Too many partitions (17)". 

In my lab I have Intel NUC with local SSD identified as "t10.ATA_____INTEL_SSDMCEAW240A4_____________________CVDA4426003E240M____".

To get partition table use following command

 partedUtil getptbl "t10.ATA_____INTEL_SSDMCEAW240A4_____________________CVDA4426003E240M____"  

If disk is empty you should see follwoing output:

msdos
29185 255 63 468862128

I would like to have 5 x 10Gb LUNs.

10Gb is 20971519 in sectors. Sector is 512Bytes

First 2048 should be skipped to keep space for GPT and to be aligned with 512B sectors. Below is my partition plan in format [Partition number, Start sector, End Sector]

P1 2048-20973567
P2 20973568-41945087
P3 41945088-62916607
P4 62916608-83888127
P5 83888128-104859647

Following command is used to create these 5 partitions.

 partedUtil setptbl "t10.ATA_____INTEL_SSDMCEAW240A4_____________________CVDA4426003E240M____" gpt "1 2048 20973567 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0" "2 20973568 41945087 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0" "3 41945088 62916607 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0" "4 62916608 83888127 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0" "5 83888128 104859647 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0"  

Now you can list partitions again and you should see following output:

gpt
29185 255 63 468862128
1 2048 20973567 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 vmfs 0
2 20973568 41945087 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 vmfs 0
3 41945088 62916607 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 vmfs 0
4 62916608 83888127 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 vmfs 0
5 83888128 104859647 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 vmfs 0 

So we have 5 partitions and the last step is to format it to VMFS5 file system. We have to leverage vmkfstools which is also included in ESXi 6 system.

Let's start with first partition and we will use datastore name Datastore1.

 vmkfstools -C vmfs5 -S Datastore1 t10.ATA_____INTEL_SSDMCEAW240A4_____________________CVDA4426003E240M____:1  

The same procedure has to be repeated for each partition.

Here is Perl script which generates commands for partedUtil and vmkfstools based on several variables.

 #!/usr/bin/perl  
 #  
 my $disk_device = "t10.ATA_____INTEL_SSDMCEAW240A4_____________________CVDA4426003E240M____";  
 my $starting_sector = 2048;  
 my $partition_size_in_sectors = 4000000;  
 my $datastore_prefix = "Datastore";  
 my $num_of_partitions = 16; # Maximum is 16 partitions  
 my $partitions;  
 my $start = $starting_sector;  
 my $end;  
 my $i;  
 # Generate command for GPT partitions  
 for ($i=1; $i<$num_of_partitions; $i=$i+1) {  
     $end = $start + $partition_size_in_sectors;  
     $partitions .= "\"$i $start $end AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0\" ";  
     $start = $end + 1;  
 }  
 print "partedUtil setptbl \"$disk_device\" gpt $partitions\n";  
 # Generate commands to format partitions with VMFS5 file system  
 #  
 for ($i=1; $i<$num_of_partitions; $i=$i+1) {  
     print "vmkfstools -C vmfs5 -S $datastore_prefix$i $disk_device:$i\n";  
 }  

If you want to unmount 16 datastores it is very handy to use following command line:

 esxcli storage filesystem unmount -l Datastore1   

Hope this helps at least one other vSphere dude in his lab exercises. 

How to manage VCSA services via CLI

VMware vCenter Server Appliance (aka VCSA) is composed from several services. These services are  manageable through Web Client but in case you would need or want to use CLI here are some tips.

First of all you have to connect to VCSA via ssh and enable shell.

shell.set –enabled True
shell

Run the below command to list the services currently present on the VCSA.

service-control --list

If you want to check the status of the services, then run the below command.

service-control --status

Command above will list all the services that are present on the VCSA, even the ones that are not running listed at the end.

If you want start particular service you will have to use following syntax

service-control --start

to stop service

service-control --stop

If you want to start or stop all service use following commands

service-control --start --all
service-control --stop --all

Not very difficult, right?

VCSA is the only VMware vSphere management of the future, so don't be afraid and go VCSA!