Category: NSX/SDDC (Page 5 of 6)

NSX Livefire Course

October 4, 2017 / David / 0 Comments

Recently I was lucky enough to attend a NSX livefire course hosted at the VMware EMEA HQ in Staines, It’s designed to facilitate a intensive knowledge transfer of NSX related subject matter. All participants are bound by NDA, however most of the information is GA with the exception of roadmap information.

Day One

Day one was focused on introducing all the participants, laying a foundation for the course objectives as well as some background info on NSX. In addition the following topics were covered:

Lab intro
Dynamic routing and operations
Integrating NSX with phyiscal infrastructure

Day Two

We covered:

Security
Multi site implementations
Business continuity and disaster recovery

Day Three

We covered:

Operations and Troubleshooting
Cloud management integration

Day Four

We covered:

VDI
Best practice

Overall, it was a very packed few days but an extremely valuable and positive experience. I would strongly recommend attending if given the chance.

Homelab – Nested ESXi with NSX and vSAN

October 3, 2017 / David / 2 Comments

The Rebuild

I decided to trash and rebuild my nested homelab to include both NSX and vSAN. When I attempted to prepare the hosts for NSX I received the following message:

I’ve not had this issue before so I conducted some research. I found a lot of blog posts / comments / KB articles linking this issue to VUM. For example : https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2053782

However, after following the instructions I couldn’t set the “bypassVumEnabled” setting. Nor could I manually install the NSX vibs and was presented with the following:

[root@ESXi4:~] esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/vsanDatastore/VIB/vib20/esx-nsxv/VMware_bootbank_esx-nsxv_6.5.0-0.0.6244264.vib –force
[LiveInstallationError]
Error in running [‘/etc/init.d/vShield-Stateful-Firewall’, ‘start’, ‘install’]:
Return code: 1
Output: vShield-Stateful-Firewall is not running
watchdog-dfwpktlogs: PID file /var/run/vmware/watchdog-dfwpktlogs.PID does not exist
watchdog-dfwpktlogs: Unable to terminate watchdog: No running watchdog process for dfwpktlogs
ERROR: ld.so: object ‘/lib/libMallocArenaFix.so’ from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
Failed to release memory reservation for vsfwd
Resource pool ‘host/vim/vmvisor/vsfwd’ release failed. retrying..
Resource pool ‘host/vim/vmvisor/vsfwd’ release failed. retrying..
Resource pool ‘host/vim/vmvisor/vsfwd’ release failed. retrying..
Resource pool ‘host/vim/vmvisor/vsfwd’ release failed. retrying..
Resource pool ‘host/vim/vmvisor/vsfwd’ release failed. retrying..
Set memory minlimit for vsfwd to 256MB
ERROR: ld.so: object ‘/lib/libMallocArenaFix.so’ from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
Failed to set memory reservation for vsfwd to 256MB
ERROR: ld.so: object ‘/lib/libMallocArenaFix.so’ from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.
Failed to release memory reservation for vsfwd
Resource pool ‘host/vim/vmvisor/vsfwd’ released.
Resource pool creation failed. Not starting vShield-Stateful-Firewall

It is not safe to continue. Please reboot the host immediately to discard the unfinished update.
Please refer to the log file for more details.
[root@ESXi4:~]

In particular I was intrigued by the “Failed to release memory reservation for vsfwd” message. I decided to increase the memory configuration of my ESXi VM’s from 6GB to 8GB and I was then able to prepare the hosts from the UI.

TLDR; If you’re running ESXi 6.5, NSX 6.3.3 and vSAN 6.6.1 and experiencing issues preparing hosts for NSX, increase the ESXi memory configuration to at least 8GB.

Homelab v2 – Part 1

May 19, 2017 / David / 0 Comments

Out with the old

My previous homelab, although functional was starting to hit the limits of 32GB of RAM, particularly when running vCenter, vSAN, NSX, etc concurrently.

A family member had use for my old lab so I decided to sell it and get a replacement whitebox.

Requirements

Quiet – As this would live in my office and powered on pretty much 24/7 it need a silent running machine
Power efficient – I’d rather not rack up the electric bill.
64GB Ram Support

Nice to have

10GbE
IPMI / Remote Access
Mini-ITX

Order List

I’ve had a interest in the Xeon-D boards for quite some time, the low power footprint, SRV-IO support, integrated 10GbE, IPMI and 128GB RAM support make it an attractive offering. I spotted a good deal and decided to take the plunge on a Supermicro X10SDV-4C+-TLN4F

As for a complete list:

Motherboard – Supermicro X10SDV-4C+-TLN4F

RAM – 64GB (4x16GB) ADATA DDR4

Case – TBC, undecided between a supermicro 1U case or a standard desktop ITX case

Network – Existing gigabit switch. 10GbE Switches are still quite expensive, but it’s nice to have future compatibility on the motherboard for it.

I’ve yet to take delivery of all the components, part 2 will include assembly.