vmware infrastructure plannerfiles.vip.vmware.com/vip_data_collector_installation_guide.pdfi n s t a...

Installation Guide / 1

I N S T A L L A T I O N G U I D E

VMware Infrastructure Planner Release 2.0.168

Thanks for participating in a VMware Infrastructure Planner assessment!

Table of Contents 1. Release Notes for vSAN Assessment v. 2.0.168.0 ................................................................................................................. 2

2. About vSAN Assessment ....................................................................................................................................................... 34

3. Install and configure the virtual appliance .............................................................................................................................. 45

2.1 vSAN Assessment ............................................................................................................................................................ 45

2.2 Offline vSAN Assessment ................................................................................................................................................. 12

2.3.1 Configuring the Offline Collection on the Portal ................................................................................................................... 13

2.3.2 Configuring the Offline Assessment on the Collector........................................................................................................... 17

4. Troubleshooting Common Issues ...................................................................................................................................... 1819




1. Release Notes for vSAN Assessment v. 2.0.168

What’s New

Highlights

1. The product is now tested and certified against vSphere 55u1 and 55u2 The collector that existed from the 2.0.167 release was certified to run on vSphere Versions 55u3, to 6.5. In this release, the collector has been tested and certif ied for versions: 55u1 and 55u2.

2. Enhancements with the configuration process to handle powered off VMs and VM Templates better.

3. Bug Fixes 4. Users are now encouraged to seek support advice via email to [email protected].

Previously, the email id was deprecated and the support of the vSAN Assessment tool was moved to VMware GSS. With this release, we are allowing users to pick either mode of seeking support, i.e. GSS or [email protected]

Enhancements

1. Hide VM templates from list of VMs in the VM selection page During the configuration of the collector, there was a VM selection page which showed all the VMs in the Cluster.

In case of per-VM based analysis, even the VM Templates were shown and allowed to be chosen for

assessment. This led to an unusual state in the collector where it would never populate any data against the

templates and they would appear as powered off VMs polluting the overall report. This has now been disallowed

and templates are not allowed to be selected.

2. Retain collection duration in collection duration page Another small improvement is to show the values selected for days and hours count in collection duration page

when user moves back and forward from the page. It is useful to retain this information on the page when user

comes back to the collection duration page.

3. Hide Clusters which don't have even a single VM powered on Clusters which don’t have even a single VM powered on when we choose per cluster assessment were also

showed on the UI where we select the cluster for assessment, in the Per-Cluster Assessment mode. This would

put the collector in a state where it would indefinitely wait for VMs to be powered on. And during this while, it

would appear as though the collector is hung. This has not been disallowed and a user cannot configure an

assessment while having checked a cluster which has no powered on VMs.

4. Add paging to VM list on the collector summary page The Collector’s status page shows the list of all VMs when the collection process begins. However, large

environments have hundreds of VMs and the amount of scrolling was enormous to reach to the bottom of the

page. To have a better experience around this, the VMs are now chunked into pages of length 25.

mailto:[email protected]




Bug Fixes

1. On selecting auto mode of VIB Install, do not show the Maintenance Mode warning In the past releases, the message popup shows the Maintenance Mode warning in VIB Installation Page on

selecting Automatic mode of VIB Installation mode. But in new version of VIP tool the maintenance mode warning

has been removed from the content of Automatic mode VIB Installation.

2. About vSAN Assessment This document discusses the steps required to install and configure the Infrastructure Planner Virtual Appliance. There are be two types of assessments that can be run via VIP: (1) vCloud Suite Assessment and (2) vSAN Assessment.




Here’s a quick overview of the steps required to install and configure the virtual appliance

1. Complete sign-up to your Infrastructure Planner assessment and create an assessment. You will see an option to

choose which type of assessment you want to create – (1) vCloud Suite Assessment or (2) vSAN Assessment.

NOTE: the vCloud Suite Assessment is no more in support and will be deprecated in the following releases.

2. For vSAN assessments:

a. Login and download the Infrastructure Planner virtual appliance from vip.vmware.com

3. Deploy the Infrastructure Planner virtual appliance

4. Configure the Infrastructure Planner virtual appliance

5. Wait for the assessment to finish, and then review the Infrastructure Planner findings in the online vip.vmware.com

portal

See below for detailed guidance on each of these steps.

You will need the following information to complete installation:

• vCenter Server(s): addresses, admin usernames and passwords

• Proxy server information, if required to reach vip.vmware.com

• Assessment key associated with your assessment: you can find this by logging into vip.vmware.com

3. Install and configure the virtual appliance

2.1 vSAN Assessment

1. Follow link from invitation e-mail to sign-up to your Infrastructure Planner assessment

http://vip.vmware.com/







2. For vSAN Assessments, login and download the Infrastructure Planner virtual appliance from vip.vmware.com

3. Deploy the Infrastructure Planner virtual appliance:

Deploy the file “infrastructure_planner_virtual_appliance.ova” from the bundle downloaded in Step 2:

a. Using the vSphere Client (Windows-based client) to deploy:




i. Access the File Menu in vSphere-client and select Deploy OVF template

ii. Browse to the location on your computer where the unzipped OVA dump is and select OVA template ending with .OVA

iii. Confirm OVA details

iv. Select the Data center and then the host/cluster where this OVA is going to be deployed. Please ensure you select a 64-bit host.

v. On the “disk format” screen, select either the "Thin Provision" or "Thick Provision" option. If unsure, select "Thin Provision"

vi. Click “Finish” to start deployment of the VA

vii. Deployment may take some time – please be patient!

viii. Once the VA is deployed successfully, it will show as a VM with the name provided during deployment. Select this and power it on.

b. Using the vSphere Web Client to deploy:

i. First, ensure that the “Client Integration plug-in” is installed before you deploy. This plug-in enables the Web Client to deploy OVA/OVF templates on your local file system.

o If using Internet Explorer, disable “Protected Mode” for the Internet before installing the plug-in:

▪ Open the browser and select Tools > Internet Options

▪ Click the Security tab and deselect Enable Protected Mode for the Internet and Local intranet zones.

o Using the vSphere Web Client, navigate to your vCenter Server. At the bottom of the page, click

“Download Client Integration Plug-in”




o For more information, see “Install the Client Integration Plug-In in the vSphere Web Client” at http://tinyurl.com/mqccbdx (5.1 link), http://tinyurl.com/mo8jagc (5.5 Link). http://tinyurl.com/mqccbdx (5.1 link), (5.5 Link).

o

ii. Select any inventory object that is a valid parent object of a virtual machine

o Eg a datacenter, folder, cluster, resource pool, or host

iii. Select Actions > All vCenter Actions > Deploy OVF Template

iv. Follow the steps in the wizard to deploy the virtual appliance:

o When browsing to the .ova file you downloaded previously, be sure that “.ova” is selected

http://tinyurl.com/mqccbdx

http://tinyurl.com/mo8jagc




ii. Once the VA is deployed successfully, it will show as a VM with the name provided during deployment. Select this

and power it on.

For more details on VA deployment, please see: http://tinyurl.com/or2wwsf (5.1 Link), http://tinyurl.com/kckss8r (5.5 link)

4. Ensure outgoing HTTP access is enabled on all hosts running VMs to be analyzed

During vSAN Assessments, ESXi hosts need to download a VIB file from the Infrastructure Planner virtual appliance, using HTTP/TCP port 80, before data can be collected. By default, ESXi hosts are configured to allow outgoing HTTP access on port 80. However, due to security considerations in your environment, this might be disabled. Follow the steps below to ensure outgoing HTTP access is enabled on all hosts.

http://tinyurl.com/or2wwsf

http://tinyurl.com/kckss8r




a. Using the vSphere Client (Windows-based client) to enable outgoing HTTP access:

i. Select a host running one or more VMs to be analyzed, and select the Configuration tab in the top bar, then Software … Security Profile in the left sidebar. You should see a screen like this:

ii. If under Firewall, Outgoing Connections, httpClient is not checked, or is restricted to a set of IP addresses that would not include the virtual appliance (see step 6 to determine the IP address of the virtual appliance), click on the “Properties …” link on the right of “Firewall”. You should see a screen like this:




iii. Select the row for httpClient and check it if necessary. Select the option “Firewall …”. Either select

“Allow connections from any IP address”, or, for added security, the option “Only allow connections from the following networks”, and fill in an address filter for the addresses you want to allow. For maximum security, you may enter xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/32 where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of the Infrastructure Planner virtual appliance. Then select the “OK” button in the “Firewall Settings” dialog.

iv. Select the “OK” button in the “Firewall Properties” dialog.

v. Repeat steps i) to iv) for all hosts running VMs to be analyzed

b. Using the vSphere Web Client to enable outgoing HTTP access:

i. Select an ESX host running one or more VMs to be analyzed. Click the “Manage” tab on the top most bar, then the “Settings” tab on the second top bar, and then click “Security Profile” in the left sidebar.




You should see a screen like this:

ii. Under Firewall, Outgoing Connections, ensure httpClient is enabled with an address filter than includes the Infrastructure Planner virtual appliance’s IP address. (“All” is fine.) If httpClient does not appear or has a non-matching address filter, select the “Edit …” button to the right of the bold “Firewall” label. You should see a screen like this:




iii. Ensure the httpClient row is checked. Next to “IP Addreses”, ensure either “Alllow connections from

any IP address” is checked, or, for added security, fill in an address filter for the addresses you want to allow. For maximum security, you may enter xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/32 where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of the Infrastructure Planner virtual appliance. Then select the “OK” button in the dialog box.

iv. Repeat steps i) to iii) for all hosts running VMs to be analyzed

5. Configure the Infrastructure Planner virtual appliance

Once Infrastructure Planner boots, the virtual appliance console window will display a URL. Navigate to this URL using a web browser. Prepending “https://” to this URL is required. You will be presented with a configuration wizard which contains six steps: 1) Connect the virtual appliance with the portal by entering the assessment key. You can find the assessment key by

logging into vip.vmware.com. You can also provide the proxy information if required to reach https://vip.vmware.com from the virtual appliance

2) Choose an option for the type of vSAN Assessment to perform. (a) Analyze specific VM(s) in the environment or (b) analyze all VMs belonging to a cluster

3) Enter the address, administrative username and password of the vCenter Server you wish to include in the assessment.

4) Select specific VMs to perform assessment if you picked option (a) in step 2. If you picked option (b), then select the cluster to analyze all VMs belonging to the cluster.

5) Confirm the VMs you selected in the previous step. 6) Configure the collection duration between 0-14 days. By default, we recommend that you do a 2-days collection to get

a good amount of IO characteristics. 7) Select a VIB Installation node. There are two options:

a) Automatic: This mode requires vSphere DRS to be enabled and in fully-automated mode on the cluster

participating in the vSAN assessment. vSAN assessment needs a new vib to be installed on every host

participating in the assessment. In this mode, the collector appliance will install the vib on each of the hosts

sequentially.

b) Manual: In this mode, VIB installation needs to be performed manually on every host participating in the vSAN assessment. For instructions on manually installing the VIB, please refer to the VIB Installation Instruction documentation.

8) We’re done with configuring the collector. Collection will begin shortly.

vSAN Assessment Tool Resource Utilization

Based on our tests, we have seen that overhead added by the vSAN Assessment tool to the ESX host resource utilization and Virtual Machine performance is negligible. The overhead of running vSAN assessment on Virtual Machine IOPS is within the noise range (almost zero). vSAN assessment tool's CPU utilization is extremely low, typically <2%. In addition to this, vSAN assessment writes also some data to the datastore and consumes very low IOPS (~0.03% of the total IOPS) on the datastore.

2.2 Offline vSAN Assessment The new feature enables a collector to run in a completely ‘offline’ mode. This means the setup on which the collector appliance is running has no access to the internet. The following are the use cases targeted with this feature:

• The datacenter on which the collector appliance is running has no connection to the internet.

• The setup on which the collector appliance that is being configured is known to have internet issues which might impede the normal behavior of the collector.

An end to end scenario of an offline collection is as follows:

• The SE/Partner configures an offline collection on the portal.

https://vip.vmware.com/

http://files.vip.vmware.com/InstallingVSANAssessmentVIB.pdf




• The invitation is sent to the customer.

• The customer signs up for the assessment and follows the steps till EULA Acceptance and downloads the offline collector OVF.

• The OVF is then taken in a portable storage device and deployed on a server which has network access to the cluster/Datacenter which needs to be evaluated.

• The collector is configured and finishes running for the specified amount of time.

• Once the collector finishes running, the customer downloads the offline bundles from the collector and uploads them to the portal.

• The portal then processes them and generates reports. Post the point of uploading the offline bundles, the steps remain the same as in an online collection.

Below is the detailed explanation of how to configure the portal and the collector and the highlights of the changes in the UI to expect.

2.3.1 Configuring the Offline Collection on the Portal 1. The screen for the vSAN assessment now has another checkbox that will mark the assessment as offline.

2. Once the assessment is configured as ‘offline’, the next screen will provide a confirmation about the type.




Also note that the path of the collection is different and the number of the states the SE/Partner will see is 5.

3. The steps on the customer side are the same till the EULA acceptance. Once the customer has accepted the EULA, the path deviates from the normal states for the online collection. The customer will now see an option to upload offline bundles.




4. Once the offline bundles are uploaded, the portal will take some time to process them and generate the report.




5. If it so happens that you’re running multiple offline assessments and you accidentally upload the offline bundles of another assessment to an assessment, then the portal will enter into a different error state. This state will provide the information and also give the user another chance to upload the appropriate set of bundles. Here’s a screenshot showing the state




After you click the ‘Upload Offline Bundles Again’ button, the same dialog as the original one you saw, when uploading the offline bundles will appear and give you a chance to upload proper bundles.

2.3.2 Configuring the Offline Assessment on the Collector The collector also needs to be made aware that it should run in an offline mode. This will render the collector to issue no request over HTTP to the portal. All the data it collects will be written locally on its filesystem. Once the collection is over, the assessment status page will provide an option to download the offline bundles. Once we have the offline bundles, the customer logs back into the portal and follows the steps mentioned above to upload the offline bundles. Below are the steps that show the changes in the configuration of the offline collector:

1. The home screen of the collector now has a checkbox for marking the assessment offline. Please check the box. Also notice that the proxy configuration will disappear since it’s going to run in an offline mode.




2. The remaining steps of the configuration are the same as the online collector. 3. Once the collection begins, you can see a disabled Download button with a note saying the download will be enabled after

the collection is over.

4. After the collection is over, the download button will become active and you can download the offline bundles.

4. Troubleshooting Common Issues

Collector VM console shows https:/0.0.0.0/

After powering on the virtual appliance, if you receive an error screen such as the one shown below, please use vCenter Server to manually edit the virtual appliance’s network settings to ensure that network connectivity (IP address, gateway, DNS) is configured correctly.




Additional Issues:

1. Issues with deploying collector VM

a. The collector can be deployed to vCenter using various clients that can fail for different reasons. Please check

with the specific client’s documentation for troubleshooting tips.

2. Issues with collector configuration

a. Static IP configuration

- Typos in IP address, gateway, DNS can result in collector not able to reach the Portal at vip.vmware.com

b. DHCP

- Collector console shows URL https://0.0.0.0/ or no network detected. If the collector’s virtual nic is connected to

the right port-group, rebooting can help to resolve the issue.

c. Not supporting HTTP Proxy

- Currently we’re not supporting NTLM proxy. One solution is to add a 2nd nic that connect to an unsecure port

group that has direct access to the internet.

d. Not in the same network with vCenter, ESXi Hosts

- The collector needs to access both vCenter and ESXi Hosts for it work properly. Adding additional vnic can help

to solve the problem.

e. Unable to login to the console

- Due to security lockdown, most ports to the collector VM are closed. The root password is randomized during

creation process such that no one can login.

f. vCenter credential

- We require administrator’s credential to vCenter.

3. Issues specific to vSAN Assessment

a. Unable to install VIB

- Consult this document for commands to work with the VIBdocument for commands to work with the VIB

b. Unable to collect IO traces

- Check the assessment status page. The number of trace/histogram collection should be reasonable high

comparing to how long the collection has been going. Each collection interval is 20 minutes so in a day, we should

expect 3 * 24 = 72 traces for continuous collection. When there are many VMs in the hosts, we might not be able

to collect continuously, resulting in a lower count.

c. Collection Past-Due

https://0.0.0.0/

http://files.vip.vmware.com/vsan_assessment_on_production_environment.pdf




We’ve been noticing that a small number of assessments suffer from a collection past-due warning in the Portal:

Please do not attempt to force quit the vSAN Assessment since the collector VM in the customer environment

might be in the progress of sending more data to the Portal. Please following the following steps:

1) Determine if the collector has been collecting data.

- Navigate to https://collector_ip_address/

- Enter assessment token to unlock if necessary

- Verify that the number of tracefile/histogram collection count is not zero.

2) Cache analysis result

- In the same collector status page, verify that there are data in the cache size column. Each workload should

have a number for cache size when the analysis

3) Check that there are no outstanding collection jobs

- Navigate to https://collector_ip_address/sidekiq

- Verify that there’s no outstanding jobs in running, schedule, retry queues

4) If it looks like the collection is still on-going and there are jobs running, please check back later to give the

collector a chance to send the data to Portal. However, if there’s no activities, please begin the log bundle

collection process (see the Log bundle collection topic below) and open a support case by contacting vip-

[email protected]

d. Collection without data

We’ve been noticing that a small number of assessment resulted in no data in the Portal. This might be caused by

early force quit (see above), VIB installation errors, configurations, network, powered-off collector, etc…Please

follow the troubleshooting tips in the “Collection Past-Due” topic above.

e. Short Sanity/Dry-Run Collection

Due to VIB installation requirements, Collector to Portal/Internet/vCenter/ESX hosts connections, a vSAN

Assessment might fail due to issues at different connection, it is a good idea to perform a shorter sanity/dry-run

collection prior to the full 7-days collection. This will help to discover collection issues earlier in process. A short

collection from a couple of hours to one day should be sufficient depending on the time requirements.

f. Log bundle collection instructions:

1) Visit to the root page of the collector via a browser

2) Enter the assessment key to unlock

3) Select "Export logs" in the lower right corner

4) Re-enter the assessment key and download the logs

5) Then please upload the log file to VMware Support FTP site. You can also share a dropbox link, etc...

4. Issues related to VIP Portal

a. Unable to use forgot password feature




- This happens when users forgot to confirm the account by clicking on the link sent to their email address. Need

to escalate to engineering.

b. Unable to find the sign-up link

- Sign-up link is not available to general public. VMware SE and Partners will need to check marketing materials

for the link to sign-up for an account.

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