VMware vSphere - Adam Grare - ManageIQ Design Summit 2016

ManageIQ for VMware vSphereAdam Grare

Agenda

Introduction

What’s new for vSphere in Darga?

What’s next?

Q&A

Introduction

Adam Grare - ManageIQ Developer and Red Hat Senior Software Engineer focusing on VMware vSphere Provider

Email: agrare@redhat.com

Gitter: @agrare

What’s new in Darga?

Features

vSphere Distributed Switches (VDS)

VM Reconfigure - Adding/Removing Disks

Datastore Clusters

Behind the scenes

Paged inventory collection for large environments

Read-only datastore handling

New Features in Darga for vSphere

vSphere Distributed Switches (VDS)

vSphere Distributed Switches - what are they?

The Problem:

Traditionally host networking was configured per-host, and multiple networks had to have the same name for vMotion to work

vSphere Distributed Switches - what are they?

The Problem:

As the number of hosts grew configuration overhead increased as did the potential for errors

vSphere Distributed Switches - what are they?

The Solution:

A VDS aggregates host NICs into a single switch

This allows the administrator to configure networking in a single location

vSphere Distributed Switches in ManageIQ

ManageIQ already supported provisioning a VM to a VDS by querying the vCenter directly (a temporary workaround added in 2010)

This caused issues with networking and session size due to caching all the VDS and LANs

vSphere Distributed Switches - what’s new?

DistributedVirtualSwitch and DistributedVirtualPortGroup were added to our VMwareWebService gem

The relationship between switches and hosts was changed from 1:1 to many-to-many, and a new model, HostSwitch, was created to track the associations

vSphere Distributed Switches - what’s new?

Distributed switches are now collected with inventory refresh, are stored in VMDB, and can be seen on the host network summary page

vSphere Distributed Switches - what’s new?

This allows you to provision VMs to a VDS LAN without communicating directly to the vCenter

vSphere Distributed Switches - Demo

vSphere Distributed Switches - what’s next?

Improve how VDS are displayed

Currently a switch is shown for each host member

Want to move display of VDS to the provider level with better summary screens

vSphere Distributed Switches - what’s next?

Extend the EventCatcher to pick up new DVPortGroups without a full refresh

This will help us integrate better with SDDC tools like NSX which dynamically create DVS LANs

VM Reconfigure - Adding/Removing Disks

VM Reconfigure - Adding/Removing Disks

In Addition to CPUs and Memory, Disks can now be added to and removed from VMs using the Reconfigure Virtual Machine page

VM Reconfigure - Adding/Removing Disks

Multiple disks can be added and removed in the same ReconfigVM_Task up to the maximum number that VMware supports (60 disks)

Disks can be thin or thick provisioned, and snapshot dependence and persistence can be set by the user

VM Reconfigure - Adding/Removing Disks - Demo

Datastore Clusters

Datastore Clusters

Similar to Compute Clusters for hosts, Datastore Clusters allow aggregation of individual datastore resources and automated Storage vMotion through Storage DRS

Datastore Clusters - what’s new?

The StoragePod type was added to our VMwareWebService gem

Datastore Clusters are now collected in inventory refresh

Datastore Clusters - what’s new?

Displayed in a tree-view on the Storage page

Datastore Clusters - what’s new?

When provisioning a VM, datastores will show which cluster they are in

Datastore Clusters - what’s next?

Collect if Storage DRS is enabled and allow provisioning to the datastore cluster, not just a specific datastore

Behind the Scenes

Paged inventory collection

Initial inventory collection used to be done in a single API call

With large environments it would hit our HTTP timeout, and we would progressively increase this timeout and retry

Paged inventory collection

Now initial inventory is retrieved in pages and the timeout+retry loop has been removed, speeding up large inventory collection

Both WaitForUpdates and RetrieveProperties were updated to collect inventory in pages

Read-only datastores

Mounting an NFS datastore read-only is common for datastores containing e.g.: ISO images

These were sometimes being picked by users or auto-placement during provisioning and the VM provision would fail

Read-only datastores

Now we track the mount-info of each datastore to each host in the HostStorage model

If a datastore is mounted read-only it will be excluded from the provisioning dialog

What’s next for the E-Release?

Add Support for Storage Policy Based Management

Display Policy on VMs and Datastores

Select an existing policy when provisioning a VM

This will be first new vSphere Management SDK endpoint added since VIM

What’s next for the E-Release?

Enhanced vApp support

Power Operations

Cloning

Provisioning

What’s next for the E-Release?

Improve on features added in Darga

VDS

Datastore Clusters

Q&A

Questions?

Thank You!