Saturday, November 30, 2019

PBKAC and Nested ESXi VSAN

This post is a short one about a PBKAC (Problem Between Keyboard and Chair) and how I discovered it while setting up a nested VSAN cluster in my home lab.

I've recently decided to install a nested VSAN environment. I've created 4 nested ESXi hosts running 6.7 U3, added disks to them (flash disks) and tried to configure VSAN. And it was not smooth at all.

First, I've noticed I couldn't add flash devices as capacity tier. Disks were seen only when I manually marked them as HDD in vCenter Server. Even after doing this, the "NEXT" button was grayed out and couldn't complete the cluster creation.

Being a stubborn engineer, I did not read the manual, but I've dropped the UI and went all the way esxcli. Created the VSAN cluster in command line with no luck this time also. The cluster ended up in a split cluster scenario while UI showed confusing health messages.

Decided there is something wrong with my 6.7 U3 image (?!?) and Sunday coming to an end, I've temporarily postponed the project. Restarted it a few days later to find out that I was using vCenter Server 6.7 build 13639324 (U2a).So yeah, vCenter Server 6.7 U2a and VSAN 6.7 U3a doesn't sound like a good match. Immediately, I've updated vCenter Server to U3a and VSAN cluster creation took 5 minutes.

It wasn't a waste of time, as I've dusted off some powershell and I've learnt a valuable lesson: always check the version of your components. But it was definitely a PBKAC.

No comments: