vsan Support Insight First Published On: Last Updated On:

Transcription

1 First Published On: Last Updated On:

2 Table of Contents 1. Benefits of vsan enhanced support 1.1.Overview of support benefits 1.2.FAQ 1.3.Sample Views of vsan support tools 2. CEIP configuration and information 2.1.Setup, Configuration and Networking Requirements 2.2.Export of CEIP 2.3.Video Demonstration 2

3 1. Benefits of vsan enhanced support Information on the how vsan enhanced support can help your environment perform it's best. 3

4 1.1 Overview of support benefits vsan Enhanced Support VMware Has made several improvements to vsan 6.6 to improve the experience in working with VMware support. vsan observer as of vsan 6.6 is deprecated but still included. In its place, more powerful tools delivered in the form of enhanced support capabilities. Why was vsan Support Analytics built? vsan observer had some challenges that have led to it being deprecated. It only ran when manually invoked It was not designed to run all of the time (It did not manage roll-up of log information over time). It only received updates when vcenter was updated (New Dashboards, and thresholds required user updates) The vsan performance Service and health service provides updated health checks for known issues and gives visibility to the end user. Still, there were some additional issues to address. Troubleshooting required the customer to export the logs and send them to support. Incidents required a customer to open a ticket before engineering could be made aware of the issue. Engineering and GSS only had a small sample size to compare if an issue was rare, or common. New health checks were difficult to QA for false positives without having the ability to test against impacted customers. The logical step was to leverage the CEIP framework to phone home performance, configuration, and health telemetry. The wide variety of data collected allows for: The health check team to rapidly test improvements to existing health checks as well as new ones for accuracy The vsan Compatability Guide (VCG) team to identify common causes for problems (such as a common NIC firmware causing TCP retransmits) The engineering team to fix issues that have not yet been reported or escalated. The support teams to more quickly be able to identify issues, and in the case of premier support, provide powerful proactive support capabilities. Product management to better be able to prioritize features by better understanding how customers have configured their environments. Product development to prioritize additional configuration assist functionality to fix the most common configuration issues. 1.2 FAQ FAQ How is this being leveraged for support? For customers with production support, this is being integrated for reactive support purposes. 4

5 Who can use it? All vsan customers with an active support contract running vsphere 6.5 Patch 2. What additional Support options exist? This is currently being integrated into Skyline and Premier support. Examples of premier support levels are as follows: Business Critical Support (BCS) - Personalized support delivered by a designated team Mission Critical Support (MCS) - Priority Access to senior-level engineers and proactive account management, 24x7 Healthcare Critical Support (HCS) - Priority Access to Senior-Level Engineers with Healthcare Industry Knowledge. For a larger overview of how engineering and others will use the data see this guide. What protocol is used for the vsan CEIP data? It is transferred using SSL (HTTPS) from the vcenter Server. This will leverage a proxy if configured for the vcenter server. For information on troubleshooting the network connectivity see this guide. Where is CEIP data transferred to? It is specifically sent to For specific firewall and network information, please see the following guide. Is data from inside VMs, Virtual Machine Names, IP Address's, Hostnames, or any user configured information phoned home as part of vsan Analytics? No. vsan is currently using CEIP data for Configuration, Health, and performance telemetry. Information with unique information is obfuscated. For more information on how to view the data sent home see this guide of how to export the JSON files. For more information on the CEIP program see the CEIP FAQ. Also, the CEIP homepage has more information regarding what is being collected and its purpose. 1.3 Sample Views of vsan support tools Example's of support views Note: that customer Hostnames and virtual machines are by default obsfucated to a "Host-number" or "VM-Number". Support has visibility of customer health checks. 5

6 Performance Graphs 6

7 Views of Health Checks 7

8 Customer Environment Views: Compare the above to the customer environment tools: 8

9 9

10 2. CEIP configuration and information Customers often want to know what a phone home system is sending back. CEIP is anonymized. Find a sample export here as well as information on how to configure, and export it. 10

11 2.1 Setup, Configuration and Networking Requirements How to enable the vsan Online Health Workflow Overview This document covers how to: configure the firewall or proxy enable CEIP perform a test upload validate that the upload worked. troubleshoot connectivity issues Prerequisites vsan Online Health needs to connect to " and " to perform online health checks. If the system uses a firewall or a proxy to connect to the internet, then a firewall/proxy rule allowing outbound traffic through for " is required Note: vcenter 6.5U1 has a known issue with CEIP failing when a proxy is in use. This will be resolved in a future patch, but a workaround is available from support. Step 1: Check CEIP status In the vsan Health checks, a CEIP check shows the CEIP status. If CEIP is disabled, click 'Configure CEIP' button or 'Enable Online Health' Button, which will navigate to the CEIP page to opt in. Step 2: Trigger the first upload Once you have enabled CEIP, click the 'Retest' Button. A new check appears in Online health called "Online health connectivity", and the 'Enable Online health' button changes to 'Retest with Online health'. click this button to trigger the first upload. Step 3: Check the Online health work properly Once the 'Retest with Online health' button is clicked, this button changes to gray, and an online health check task is triggered. Once the online health check task is done, the task status is 'Completed', and 'Retest with Online health' button is back to normal, and new health checks appear in the Online health group with the group name updated last check time. Troubleshooting If connectivity is failing, you can SSH into the vcenter and try to communicate with the CEIP webserver using the following command. curl -v " If you see "fail to connect", further tests of dns or connectivity may be needed. To test DNS connectivity use the following command. 11

12 "nslookup vcsa.vmware.com " Known Issues vcenter 6.5 Patch 2 is required to work with a vcenter Proxy. 2.2 Export of CEIP How to inspect what telemetry a live environment is sending to VMware Online Health checks collect data from the environment and send it to VMware cloud to perform health checks. You can check the data collected as a part of health checks as follows: Linux Environment: 1. SSH into VCSA 2. Run command: cd /var/log/vmware/vsan-health/ 3. Data collected by online health checks is written and gzipped to files " <uuid>cloud_health_check_data.json.gz" and " <uuid>vsan_perf_data.json.gz 4. You can extract the json content by calling " gunzip -k <gzipped-filename> " or view the contents by calling " zcat <gzipped-filename> " 5. Windows Environment: 1. Login to Windows vcenter machine. 2. Open " C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\logs\vsan-health " 3. Data collected by online health checks is written and gzipped to files " <uuid>cloud_health_check_data.json.gz " and " <uuid>vsan_perf_data.json.gz " 4. You can use 7zip or any other utilities to unzip the gzipped files 12

13 5. Data collected is obfuscated to comply with CEIP. All private data is obfuscated. You can find the obfuscated data mappings in files <uuid>_obfuscationtableforhuman.json.gz. Sample exports can be downloaded from here. Note: The obfuscation mapping files are not sent to VMware. Only obfuscated data is sent to VMware. 2.3 Video Demonstration 13

14 Click to see the video 14