Part 1 – PVRDMA and how to test it in home lab.

Part 1 – PVRDMA and how to test it in home lab.

Comments 1 comment

One of the members of the VMware User Community (VMTN) inspired me to build a configuration where two VMs use PVRDMA network adapters to communicate. The goal I wanted to achieve was to establish the communication between VMs without using Host Channel Adapter cards installed in hosts. It’s possible to configure it as stated here, in the VMware vSphere documentation. For virtual machines on the same ESXi hosts or virtual machines using the TCP-based fallback, the HCA is not required….

Read More Read More

vCloud Director Network considerations

vCloud Director Network considerations

Comments 2 comments

One of the most tricky parts of vCD – networks. It took my some time to to digest how those network relations between different types of network in vCD works. Just to remind we distinguish: External Networks VDC Organization Networks vApp Networks Moreover for both VDC Orgzanization and vApp networks we distinguish folowing types: Directly connected to upper layer network Routed network Isolated Network To complicate even further vApp directly connected network can be fenced 🙂 All networks apart from…

Read More Read More

dcli and how to shutdown vCSA

dcli and how to shutdown vCSA

Comments 0 Comment

Sometimes You want to shutdown vCSA or PSC gracefully, but You don’t have an access to GUI through vSphere Client or VAMI. How to do it in CLI? I’m going to show You right now using dcli, because I’m exploring a potential of this tool and I can’t get enough. Open an SSH session to vCSA and log in as root user. Run dcli command in an interactive mode. dcli +i Use shutdown API call, to shutdown an appliance, giving…

Read More Read More

VCSA Tools – Part 1 – journalctl. Better way for vCSA log revision.

VCSA Tools – Part 1 – journalctl. Better way for vCSA log revision.

Comments 0 Comment

There’s a plenty of great CLI tools in VCSA that modern vSphere administrator should know, so I decided to share my knowledge and describe them in the series of articles. The first one is journalctl. A tool that simplifies and quickens the VCSA troubleshooting process. Below I’m presenting how I’m using it, to filter the logs records. Log in to VCSA shell and run the commands below, regarding to the result you want to achive. The logs from the current…

Read More Read More

NVIDIA P40 – unable to power on a VM

NVIDIA P40 – unable to power on a VM

Comments 0 Comment

During recent Horizon deployment with GPUs for a Customer I’ve encounter an issue related to ECC on NVIDIA P40 GPU card. By the way as per documentation it applies to all cards with Pascal architecture. In NVIDIA documentation you can find an information that apart from installing NVIDIA’s VIB you need to disable ECC. Which is clear for me. However, using nvidia-smi command after installing that VIB the status looks as follows: ECC status is listed as N/A, which I…

Read More Read More

dcli and orphaned VMs in vCenter Server inventory

dcli and orphaned VMs in vCenter Server inventory

Comments 0 Comment

The orphaned VMs in vCenter inventory is an unusual view in experienced administrator’s Web/vSphere Client window. But in large environments, where many people manage hosts and VMs it will happen sometimes. You do know how to get rid of them using traditional methods described in VMware KB articles and by other well known bloggers, but there’s a quite elegant new method using dcli. This handy tool is available in vCLI package, in 6.5/6.7 vCSA shell and vCenter Server on Windows…

Read More Read More

NSX-V VTEP, MAC, ARP Tables content mapping

NSX-V VTEP, MAC, ARP Tables content mapping

Comments 0 Comment

It took me a while to figure out what information I see while displaying VTEP, MAC and ARP table on Controller Cluster in NSX. In documentation you can find what information are included in those tables but it might not be seemingly obvious which field contains what kind of data that’s why I decided to make a short reference for myself but maybe it will help also someone else. To understand those tables I started with Central CLI to display…

Read More Read More

VSAN real capacity utilization

VSAN real capacity utilization

Comments 1 comment

There are a few caveats that make the calculation and planning of VSAN capacity tough and gets even harder when you try to map it with real consumption on the VSAN datastore level. VSAN disks objects are thin provisioned by default. Configuring full reservation of storage space through Object Space Reservation rule in Storage Policy, does not mean disk object block will be inflated on a datastore. This only means the space will be reserved and showed as used in VSAN Datastore…

Read More Read More

Part 2 – How to list vSwitch “MAC Address table” on ESXi host?

Part 2 – How to list vSwitch “MAC Address table” on ESXi host?

Comments 0 Comment

The other way to list MAC addresses of open ports on vSwitches on the ESXi host is based on net-stats tool. Use this one-liner. for VSWITCH in $(vsish -e ls /net/portsets/ | cut -c 1-8); do net-stats -S $VSWITCH | grep \{\”name | sed ‘s/[{,”]//g’ | awk ‘{$9=$10=$11=$12=””; print $0}’; done This is not a final word. 🙂

Part 1 – How to list vSwitch “MAC Address table” on ESXi host?

Part 1 – How to list vSwitch “MAC Address table” on ESXi host?

Comments 1 comment

Sometimes You need to list MAC addresses loged on host’s vSwitches to eliminate VM’s MAC address duplicates. Create a shell script: vi mac_address_list.sh Copy and past the code listed below: #!/bin/sh #vmrale for VSWITCH in `vsish -e ls /net/portsets/ | cut -c 1-8` do echo $VSWITCH for PORT in `vsish -e ls /net/portsets/$VSWITCH/ports | cut -c 1-8` do CLIENT_NAME=`vsish -e get /net/portsets/$VSWITCH/ports/$PORT/status | grep clientName | uniq` ADDRESS=`vsish -e get /net/portsets/$VSWITCH/ports/$PORT/status | grep unicastAdd | uniq` echo -e “\t$PORT\t$CLIENT_NAME\t$ADDRESS” done…

Read More Read More