New Lab Server

Here I am, procrastinating on other stuff, to talk about the new lab setup.  I promised in the last video, I’d do a writeup, and I figured “no time like the present”!

So what do I have going on?  I’ve ripped out the ML370 and ASUS RS500A boxes, and replaced them with a veritable steal from the Dell Outlet.  I decided to go all-in for a nested lab, since I can’t come up with a good reason to put together a physical lab.

So I found a Precision T5610 with a pair of Xeon E5-2620v2s.  Twelve hyper threaded cores of processor get up and go.  The Scratch and Dent unit I bought had 32 GB of RAM installed, along with a 1 TB spindle.  Not a bad start.  But I had gear to work with, and needed more RAM.  

So I ordered a nice 64 GB upgrade kit from Crucial (well, 4 16 GB kits, technically, hoping it’d give me a 96 GB box to work with.  The pre-installed RAM and the Crucial RAM didn’t play too nicely together (Windows wouldn’t load from the spindle, nor would the ESXi installer start).  Boo.  So I pulled out the factory RAM, ran memtest86 for about a day, just to be safe, and am proceeding, for the moment, with 64 GB.

Still just a start, though, as I needed storage.  I had an Icy Dock 4-bay SATA chassis and an IBM M1015 SAS RAID controller in my little HP Microserver.  That box didn’t need those things anymore, so a transplant was necessary.  4 screws later, I had lots of room for 2.5” SATA drives.  I already had a pair of 120 GB Intel 520 SSDs in Icy Dock trays, and I pulled the 2 1 TB Crucial M550 SSDs from the ASUS box.  Now I have plenty of lab storage.  If I need more, I can always take the performance hit and attach something from the DS412+ (like I’ve already done with my “ISO_images” NFS share.

**EDIT** I ran into another snag.  The LSI controller and Icy Dock combination seem to not be playing nicely with the host.  The SSDs seem to randomly just drop offline periodically, which makes me sad.  It could be a power thing (these big SSDs are kind of notorious for power problems, especially in small drive chassis or NAS units), but I’m not going to push it any further.  I pulled the controller and drive cage out of the system, and I should have a SATA power splitter after UPS shows up today (I was too lazy to leave the house LOL), so I’m just going to run the SSDs off the on-boad SATA controller channels, and be happy about it.  

At this point, I thought I was ready for ESXi, but upon installation, I hit a snag.  The T5610 has an Intel Gigabit NIC.  As such, I expected no issues, but the 82579 isn’t noticed by ESXi 5.5u2 for whatever reason.  No biggie – this thing has a nice tool-less case, and less than a minute later, I had a dual-port Intel NIC installed and ready to go (82571EB if you’re curious).  One more reboot and ESXi was installing.

Everything’s pretty happy at the moment.  Here’s what it looks like now that I’ve built up all my virtual ESXi hosts:

Screenshot 2014 09 24 08 47 22

 

Screenshot 2014 09 24 08 48 53

 

Oh, and the “Remote_External” cluster is a set of ESXi virtual machines I have running in VMware Workstation on a Precision M4800 laptop.

I’ll follow up with some network details shortly, since that’s also gotten _way_ complex recently.  All in the name of scenario-based play with NSX. More fun later!

-jk

Deploying NSX Manager

Well, another day, another post.  

Ok, that may be exaggerating a bit, but I’m trying.  Again.  Still.

I’m rebuilding my lab (more to come on that later), and with the big push toward VMware NSX in my life right now, I thought I’d capture my fun and excitement in deploying everything.  Here’s Part 1, where I deploy the NSX Manager and register it with vCenter.  Nothing earth-shattering here, but it might help someone.

Still here. Or “Meandering thoughts about the lab that time forgot”

So, I do still exist.  I am still here, and look at this!  I even update once in a while.

My focus has shifted a little bit over the past few months.  I’m working a lot with NSX, and have been teaching the NSX: Install, Configure, Manage for a few months now.  Like, a lot.  Q3 has been absolutely nuts for me, especially with the announcement of NSX 6.1 at VMworld.

So, what does all that mean for me, and this blog, exactly?

Well, for the blog, it means a little bit less vSphere stuff, and a little bit more networking.  

Which leads us to “What does this mean for me?”.  Well, I’ve got a stack of Cisco gear here in the office now.  That must mean Cisco certification prep.  Someday, I’ll have a break and be able to actually do that 🙂

So, what Cisco stuff is in the pipeline?  CCNA – Routing and Switching is first.  that’s the basic stuff.  CCNA Data Center is soon to follow.  I’ve been tossing around CCDA because design is just a thing I do.  Do I pursue those to the NP/ND level?  I don’t know.  My guess is no, but I never leave anything off the table.

I’ve also got the VCP-NV on my list, and the forthcoming VCIX-NV when it launches.  I’ve taken a swing at the VCP-NV – I did that while I was out at VMworld, but I just missed the passing mark.  I was caught completely off-guard by some of the stuff in the exam.  It was my own fault, however, as I spent a grand total of zero time preparing and studying for the exam.  I even talked to the cert devs about the Exam Blueprint, that I didn’t actually read until the evening _after_ I wrote the exam.

That’ll be easy to rectify, however.  I know what I need to study to bump my score up over the pass mark.  Now I just need what everyone needs – time.

I also have some new lab gear incoming.  I caught a steal from the Dell Outlet the other day.  I have a scratch & dent T5610 with dual 6-core Xeon E5s on its way, and an additional 64 GB of RAM just showed up on my front porch today.  I’ll talk through the build I’m planning as I’m working through it.  I figure with 24 threads and 96 total GB of RAM, I should be able to run many, many nested ESXi hosts, especially with the VMware Tools fling and the MacLearn dvfilter fling for nested ESXi.  My old ASUS RS500A ran pretty well with 2 6-node clusters and a 4-node management cluster, each nested ESXi host with 8 GB of RAM each.  And the RS500A only had 64 GB of RAM.  

So I’m going to consolidate the ASUS and the old ML370 into a single, more modern (and likely more power efficient) box.  The tradeoff is that I’m giving up the iKVM and iLO capabilities of my existing hosts.  It’ll be ok.  I guess I’ll just have to look at IP KVMs now.  

In other news, I’ve moved my edge to higher-end gear.  Nope, nothing so fancy or cost-prohibitive as Cisco, but definitely powerful.  I picked up a Ubiquiti Networks EdgeRouter Lite the other day, and it’s pretty slick.  I’ve got a complementary UniFi AC on the way, and that should be waiting for me when I get home.  The EdgeRouter is pretty slick.  EdgeOS is based on Vyatta Core 6.3 (just before the Brocade acquisition), so I’m familiar, in passing, with the OS.  This thing is fast!

So this will all end up in a home network / lab series as I do more cool stuff with it.

As it stands, I gotta get back to class – we’re just about done deploying Controllers…

Have you upgraded your vCenter Server Appliance from vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 5.5 yet?

It’s been well over a year since I’ve been here (well, closer to 18 months, really).  I’ll apologize for that now 🙂

The reality, though, is that it’s been a long, exhausting, and rewarding year and a half, and I’ve taken on some different responsibilities at work.  That’s taken up quite a bit of my time.  I decided I just needed to roll some of that time together with this blog.  Well, at least some of the fruits of that work.

We’ve just released the latest, greatest version of vSphere – vSphere 5.5  With a new version comes a need to upgrade.

Some of you may be using the vCenter Server Appliance.  There’s an Update feature in the appliance to help update from one version to another.  But right next to that in the management UI is a tab called Upgrade.  And that’s the process I’ve just stepped through for you.  Keep in mind here that I haven’t read any of the upgrade KBs (shame on me), but this is a relatively intuitive process, I think.  

Take a look at the video – it’s about 20 minutes long – some time has been shaved off; the entire process took me about an hour, but you don’t want to watch a bunch of silence and spinning wheels, do you?  I didn’t think so.

I will throw out a caveat (that I didn’t show onscreen) that I did have to regenerate the self-signed certificates before the Web Client worked properly.  

Test this process extensively before you try this in a production environment!! Please, don’t try this blindly!

I learned quite a bit during this process, and I hope it helps you a bit.

New Lab is here!

I’m a happy camper!  My new lab gear is in.

I believe we all need some kind of lab environment to play with, otherwise we just don’t learn the hands-on stuff nearly as well or as quickly.  Some employers have lab environments in which to test.  My employer is no different, but I prefer to have control over what I deploy, and when I deploy it.  That way I have no one to blame about anything but myself 🙂

That said, I was running my lab in an old Dell Precision 390 with nothing but 4 cores, 8GB of RAM, and local storage.  That was great a couple of years ago when I put it together, but now, not so much.

The new gear is actually server-grade stuff.  And reasonably inexpensive, if you ask me.

For my storage, I stumbled on a great deal on a N40L Proliant MicroServer from HP.  after repurposing some disk I had laying around the house, I had a small, reasonable storage server.  I installed a bunch of SATA disk: 3 7200 RPM 500GB spindles and a 1TB 7200 RPM spindle in the built-in drive cage.  But that wasn’t quite enough for what I had in mind.  So I bought an IcyDock 4-bay 2.5″ drive chassis for the 5.25″ bay in the MicroServer, and added an IBM M1015 SAS/SATA PCI-e RAID controller to drive the 2.5″ devices.  I had an Intel 520 Series 120GB SSD (bought for the ESXi host, but it didn’t work out) and a WD Scorpio Black 750GB drive just hanging around.  So I added another SSD and Scorpio Black so I could mirror the devices and have some redundancy.

So there’s my SAN and NAS box.  I installed FreeNAS to a 16GB USB stick, and carved up 4 ZFS pools – platinum, gold, silver, and bronze.  Creative, I know LOL.

  • Platinum is a ZFS mirror of the 2 SSDs
  • Gold is a RAID-Z set of the 3 500GB spindles
  • Silver is a ZFS mirror of the 2 Scorpio Blacks
  • Bronze is a ZFS volume on the single 1TB spindle

ZFS Volumes

I debated on swapping Gold and Silver at length, but in the end, left the layout as described.

There are two things I don’t like about this setup, and they both revolve around the networking baked into the MicroServer.

 

  1. Jumbo Frames aren’t supported by the FreeBSD driver for the onboard BroadCom NIC.  This could be fixed in the future with a driver update or the official release of FreeNAS 8.2 (I’m running beta 2 at the moment)
  2. There’s only one onboard NIC.  I’d have liked two NICs, but for the price, maybe I’ll add a PCI-e dual-port Intel Gig card.  That would solve both dislikes.

Platinum, Gold, and Silver are presented via the iSCSI Target on the FreeNAS box as zVol extents.  Bronze is shared via NFS/CIFS, primarily for ISO storage.

As for the ESXi host itself, well here we go:

  • ASUS RS-500A-E6/PS4 chassis
  • 2 x AMD Opteron 6128 8-core CPUs
  • 64GB of Kingston ECC RAM
  • 250GB 7200RPM spindle from the MicroServer
  • 1TB 7200RPM spindle that was recycled from the old lab gear

I chose this seemingly overpowered setup for a few reasons (yep, another bullet point list)

  • Price (the server and its constituent parts only ran me ~$2100USD)
  • Nearly pre-assembled.  I’m not one for building machines anymore
  • Capacity.  Instead of running multiple physical ESXi hosts, I chose to run my lab nested.
  • Compatibility.  This server’s Intel counterpart is on the VMware HCL.  That didn’t mean this one would work, but I felt the odds were high.  The onboard NICs are also both Intel Pro 1000s, which helps.
  • LOM was included.  This is important to me, as I don’t want/need/have tons of extra monitors/keyboards hanging around

So all the parts came in, I put them installed the disks, CPUs, and RAM, dropped an ESXi CD in the drive, booted it up, and wondered – where’s the remote console?  I hadn’t thought about that, so I jacked in a monitor and keyboard only to find that the Delete key is necessary to get into the BIOS to configure the iKVM.  Well, in my case, that posed a little bit of a problem.  See, the only wired keyboards (or wireless, for that matter) are Apple keyboards, since I recently let the last physical Windows box leave my house.  So I had to see if the iKVM pulled DHCP.  I got out iNet, my trusty Mac network scanning utility, scanned my network, and there it was – a MAC address identifying as “ASUSTek Computer, Inc”.  That had to be it, so I fired up a web browser and plugged in the IP.  Now I just had to figure out the username and password.  Documentation to the rescue!  So I got everything configured up, and booted to the ESXi installer, and there you have it, one nice, 16-core 64GB of RAM ESXi host.

Host Summary

It’s doing rather well so far, I’ve got the storage attached, networking set up, and all kinds of VMs running right now, including vCenter Operations, View, SQL, vCloud Director, VMware Data Recovery, vShield Manager, a couple of Win7 desktops, and a few virtualized ESXi hosts, and this is what the box is doing:
Resource Usage
Just to reinforce the importance of Transparent Page Sharing, at the moment, this host is sharing ~17GB of RAM.
Shared Memory
Not to repeat myself, but I’m a happy camper.  I’ve got View set up, so I can work with the environment while I’m on the road, and my next step is to get vCD rolling and happy with a couple of virtualized ESXi hosts so I can start plugging away at building class-specific vApps so I can keep up with the different courses we run.
I hope this helps and perhaps even gives you some inspiration for your own lab environment.  I’m happy to answer any questions you may have about the setup, just drop me a line!

Where has 2012 gone?!

Well, this is probably one of the most delayed “Welcome to the new year” posts so far.

I have been _busy_.  This is one of my few quiet weekends since, well, I’m not sure I remember, but even this weekend’s almost over.  I mentioned on Google+ that I’m taking my VCAP5-DCD tomorrow.  I’ll talk about that experience later 🙂

After that, I fly to California for a couple of days of team meetings.  I guess I’ll get to see what our new leadership has in store for us crazy instructors this year.  I’m definitely looking forward to seeing my fellow instructors, and meeting the new management, including the Delivery Manager I’ve been working with for almost 75 days now!

Life and work have both been keeping me hopping, as evidenced by my lack of content here.  I’ve got all kinds of ideas, drafts started, thoughts jotted down.  Maybe I’ll get to them, maybe you’ll just have to come to one of my classes to get some of my insights (which, arguably, aren’t all that insightful – I’ve been cognizant of the fact that every day I’m an instructor is one more day deeper into that ivory tower of technology).  But I still try to share things that are important to me.

So keep me in your RSS feed, I’ll drop something interesting in once in a while, but this year is getting off to a rather slow start in the same way last year sort of tapered off to nothing.  I’m trying here! 🙂

-jk