Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Dell EMC PowerFlex MP for vROps 8.x Blog Series

 

Image source: infohub.delltechnologies.com/section-assets/powerflex-vrops-infographics

Consolidating all my blogs on Dell EMC PowerFlex Management Pack for vROps 8.x.

Part1: Install
Part2: Configure
Part3: Dashboards
Part4: Resource kinds and relationships
Part5: Collection interval
Part6: Create custom alerts
Part7: Create custom reports


References


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Monday, December 28, 2020

vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-T - Part3 - Edge Cluster

In the previous post, we went through basic NSX-T configurations. The next step is to deploy Edge VMs and create an Edge cluster. Before creating Edge VMs, we need to create two trunk port groups on the VDS using the VCSA web UI. Uplinks of the Edge VMs will be connected to these two trunk port groups.

  • Create 2 trunk port groups on the VDS.
    • "Trunk01-NSXT-Edge"
    • "Trunk02-NSXT-Edge"


  • Add Edge Transport Nodes.
    • Create two Edge VMs "edge-01, edge-02".
    • Click ADD EDGE VM, follow the wizard, and provide all the details.






  • Click Finish. Follow the same process and deploy one more Edge VM.

  • The next step is to create an Edge Cluster "edge-cluster-01" and add the two Edge VMs to it.


The NSX-T Edge Cluster is now ready. Next, we have to add a Tier-0 Gateway and configure BGP peering with the router or L3 TOR switches. This will be covered in the next part. Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Related posts


Part1: Prerequisites
Part2: Configure NSX-T

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Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Dell EMC PowerFlex MP for vROps 8.x - Part6 - Create custom alerts

In this post, we will take a look at creating custom alerts for PowerFlex by adding symptom definitions and alert definitions. Refer to my previous blog post to understand more about the alerting aspects in vROps. Here we will take an example scenario and see how we can create custom symptom definitions and alert definitions.

Scenario


The user is running some latency-sensitive business-critical applications using PowerFlex storage. Below are the symptoms that he would like to define and alerts should be produced for the same and these should affect the "Health" badge of the PowerFlex volume object.


Step1: Add Symptom Definitions


Go to Alerts - Symptom Definitions - Click Add.

Select base object type: Expand PowerFlex Adapter - Select Volume.

  • Select the metric User Data SDC Read Latency (ms): double click on it twice so that you can define both warning and critical symptoms.
  • Select the metric User Data SDC Write Latency (ms): double click on it twice so that you can define both warning and critical symptoms.

Now, fill all the required fields as per the conditions we defined earlier.


Click Save. Now as you can see below the 4 symptom definitions are created.


Step2: Add Alert Definitions


Go to Alerts - Alert Definitions - Click Add.

  • Provide alert name, select the base object type and advanced settings and click Next.

  • Filter and search the symptoms that we created earlier. Drag and drop the two volume read latency related symptoms and select Any. Click Next.

  • If you want to provide any recommendations you can add it in this step and click Next.
  • Select vSphere Solution's Default Policy and click Next and click Create.
Similarly, you can create an alert definition for PowerFlex Volume Write Latency too.


Now, we are all done. Let's test the alerts! I am using FIO to generate IO load on one of the PowerFlex volume.


You can see the Read Latency for this volume is grater than 1 ms, and so a warning alert should be produced for this specific volume.




Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Related posts


Part1: Install
Part2: Configure
Part3: Dashboards
Part4: Resource kinds and relationships
Part5: Collection interval 


References



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Tuesday, December 8, 2020

vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-T - Part2 - Configure NSX

In this post, we will take a look at the different configuration steps that are required before enabling workload management to establish connectivity to the supervisor cluster, supervisor namespaces, and all objects that run inside the namespaces, such as vSphere pods, and Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters. 

At this point, I assume that the vSAN cluster is up and NSX-T 3.0 is installed. NSX-T appliance is connected to the same management network where the VCSA and ESXi nodes are connected. In my case, it will be through VLAN 41. Note that all the ESXi nodes of the vSAN cluster are connected to one vSphere Distributed Switch and has two uplinks from each node that connects to TOR A and TOR B.


NSX-T configurations

  • Add Compute Managers. I've added the vCenter server here.


  • Add Uplink Profiles.
    • Create a host uplink profile "nsx-uplink-profile-lbsrc" (this is for host TEP using VLAN 52).
    • Create an edge uplink profile "nsx-edge-uplink-profile-lbsrc" (this is for edge TEP using VLAN 53).



  • Add Transport Zones.
    • Create an overlay transport zone "tz-overlay".
    • Create a VLAN transport zone "edge-vlan-tz".




  • Add IP Address Pools.
    • Create an IP address pool for host TEPs "TEP-Pool-01" (this is for host TEP using VLAN 52).
    • Create an IP address pool for edge TEPs "Edge-TEP-Pool-01" (this is for Edge TEP using VLAN 53).



  • Add Transport Node Profiles.


  • Configure Host Transport Nodes. Select the required cluster and click configure NSX to convert all the ESXi nodes as transport nodes.

The next step is to deploy Edge VMs (Edge Transport Nodes) and create a Edge Cluster. We will cover it in the next part. Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Related posts


Part1 - Prerequisites


References


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Monday, December 7, 2020

vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-T - Part1 - Prerequisites

In this blog series, I would like to share my experience deploying vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-T 3.0 networking. Following is a very high-level workflow of setting up the environment from scratch:


Software versions used for this study:
  • vSphere 7 U1
  • NSX-T 3.0.1.1

If you are using VCF, some of the deployment steps mentioned above are already automated. But, VCF is not in the scope of this blog series, and this post is aimed at explaining the workflow and background configurations that are required to prepare the environment before enabling workload management. This will be useful to understand the backend configuration tasks and logical workflow and will be helpful in case of troubleshooting too. In my lab, I have 4 Dell EMC PowerEdge rack servers connected to 2 TOR switches with 2 uplinks from each server. This is a consolidated architecture where both management components and application workload run on the same 4 node vSAN cluster. I am using ESXi 7 U1 and VCSA 7 U1. Here, the TORs are acting as L3 switches and we are doing BGP peering between TOR switches and NSX-T T0 Gateway which will be explained in a later part of this blog series.

Network connectivity



IP address schema and VLANs




I will not be covering how to create VLANs, configuring switch ports, deploying a vSAN cluster, etc. I assume that the network switches are correctly configured and the vSAN cluster is up and running. The next step is to deploy an NSX-T 3.0 appliance. You can either deploy it as a single node or in HA using 3 NSX-T appliances. In my lab, I have only one NSX-T 3.0 instance. Following are some of the reference material to deploy NSX-T 3.0:

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Friday, December 4, 2020

Dell EMC PowerFlex MP for vROps 8.x - Part5 - Collection interval

In this post, we will take a look at modifying the collection interval of  PowerFlex Adapter instances. The PowerFlex Management Pack for vROps supports 4 instance types.

  • PowerFlex Gateway
  • PowerFlex Networking
  • PowerFlex Manager
  • PowerFlex Nodes

The default collection interval for all these adapter instances is set to 5 minutes. In most cases, you don't need to modify this. But, say you want to get PowerFlex storage performance metrics more frequently, then you have to change the collection interval of the PowerFlex Gateway instance. You can set it to as low as 1 minute. As per the testing that I have done in the lab, a PowerFlex Gateway adapter instance is able to complete the collection process of a PowerFlex storage cluster in less than a minute.

Note: If you are modifying the collection interval from the default value, make sure to verify that the collection process is able to complete successfully within the new time interval.

Administration - Inventory - Adapter Instances - PowerFlex Adapter Instance

Note: In the product guide it is recommended to configure not more than 40 Cisco switches in one PowerFlex Networking instance. So, if you have 80 switches in your PowerFlex system, you will need to configure 2 PowerFlex Networking instances where each instance will connect/ query/ collect details from 40 switches. This is based on the default collection interval of 5 minutes.

This simply means, in 5 minutes one PowerFlex Networking adapter instance can complete the collection from a max of 40 switches only. So, in 1 minute, it can complete the collection of a maximum of 8 switches. This is a rough calculation and it depends on factors like REST API response, switch firmware/ OS version, etc. So if you change the default interval, always make sure to monitor it (the collection cycle) for some time and verify whether the collection process is able to complete successfully within the new time interval. 

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Related posts


Part1 - Install
Part2 - Configure
Part3 - Dashboards
Part4 - Resource kinds and relationships


References


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