Password expiration for both the VCSA root user and the vSphere administrator

Password expiration for both the VCSA root account and the vSphere administrator (typically administrator@vsphere.local) is a common issue, especially if the default 90-day expiration settings are overlooked. It recently happened to me in one lab environment. Fortunately, both passwords can be recovered. This blog post outlines the recovery methods that worked in my case.

vSAN ESA RAID5 issue? Not really, but ...

I was observing unexpected behavior in my vSAN ESA cluster. I have a 6-node vSAN ESA cluster and a VM with a Storage Policy configured for RAID-5 (Erasure Coding). Based on the cluster size, I would expect a 4+1 stripe configuration. However, the system is using 2+1 striping, which typically applies to clusters with only 3 to 5 nodes.

RAID-5 (2+1) striping is using 133% of the raw storage

RAID-5 (4+1) striping is using 120% of the raw storage

A 13% difference is worth investigating.

vSAN ESA RAIDs

vSAN ESA is VMware’s software-defined storage solution. Each virtual hard disk (vDisk) is represented as an object within the vSAN datastore. The properties of these vSAN objects are governed by vSAN VM Storage Policies, which define data placement and protection rules. While these policies may emulate traditional RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), vSAN actually implements RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes). This is because data components, such as stripes and replicas, are distributed across failure domains, which by default correspond to vSphere/vSAN cluster nodes (ESXi hosts). The specific striping and distribution are determined by the configured failures-to-tolerate policy and vSAN cluster size.

vSAN ESA supports multiple levels of RAID/RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) for data protection:

• RAIN-0: No redundancy (data is not protected)

• RAIN-1: Mirroring (1+1) across two nodes

• RAIN-5: Erasure coding with a 2+1 or 4+1 configuration (minimum 4 or 6 hosts)

• RAIN-6: Erasure coding with higher fault tolerance, typically 4+2, but can also be 6+2 or 8+2 depending on cluster size

These options allow you to balance storage efficiency, performance, and fault tolerance based on your specific workload and cluster topology.

How do I check the build or version number of VMware ESX?

The ESX build (version number) information is available in the Summary tab of the vSphere Client, but in larger environments it is worth to use some kind of automation. PowerShell/PowerCLI is well know scripting tool for VMware vSphere.

Below is PowerCLI one-liner to easily query all vCenters where you are connected ...

Get-VMhost | Select-Object Name,Version,Build 

If you want connect to vCenter(s) interactively, you can use following script ...

# Connect to vCenter
Write-Host "Connecting to vCenter ..."
$VC = Read-Host "Enter one vCentre Server or multiple vCenter servers delimted by comma."
Write-Host "Enter vCenter credentials ..."
$CRED = Get-Credential
Connect-VIServer -Server $VC -Credential $CRED -ErrorAction Stop | Out-Null

VMwareOpsGuide.com has been retired

I'm an architect and designer, not involved in day-to-day operations, but I firmly believe that any system architecture must be thoughtfully designed for efficient operations, otherwise the Ops team will go mad in no time.

Over the years, I’ve been learning a lot from the book VMware Operations Management by  Iwan E1 Rahabok, which covers everything related to vROps, Aria Operations, and now VCF Operations.

Veeam Backup & Replication on Linux v13 [Beta]

I have finally found some spare time and I decided to test Veeam Backup & Replication on Linux v13 [Beta] in my home lab. It is BETA, so it is good to test it and be prepared for the final release, even anything can change before the final release is available. 

There is clear information that update and upgrade into newer versions will not be possible, but I'm really curious how Veeam transition from Windows to Linux is doing. 

Anyway, let's test it and get the feeling about the Veeam future with Linux based systems.

PureStorage has 150TB DirectFlash Modules

I have just realized that PureStorage has 150TB DirectFlash Modules. 

That got me thinking. 

Flash capacity is increasing year by year. What are performance/capacity ratios?

The reason I'm thinking about it is that poor Tech Designer (like me) need some rule-of-thumb numbers for capacity/performance planning and sizing.

Virtual NIC Link Speed - is it really speed?

This will be a quick blog post, prompted by another question I received about VMware virtual NIC link speed. In this blog post I’d like to demonstrate that the virtual link speed shown in operating systems is merely a reported value and not an actual limit on throughput.

I have two Linux Mint (Debian based) systems mlin01 and mlin02 virtualized in VMware vSphere 8.0.3. Each system has VMXNET3 NIC. Both virtual machines are hosted on the same ESXi host, so they are not constraint by physical network. Let's test network bandwidth between these two systems with iperf.