Bring out the VVOLS...!!

Bring out the VVOLS...!!

I had a chance to play around with VVOLS today and to see how they've improved since my last encounter. Now, I don't have a physical SAN to play with so how do you get VVOLs in a Lab?! I was hoping StoreVirtual would have advanced by now to support VVOLs but that hasn't happened so I've been scouting around for a replacement that would offer VVOLs but not require dedicated hardware, i.e. a virtual appliance. There are a few around but they can be hard to get. My solution was to use Nimble. Now, the appliance isn't any easier to get hold of so good luck there! I'd recommend trying the NexentaStor with a trial license if you're stuck.

Between shutting down my Lab one day and starting it up the next I ran into an issue where the previous VVOL I'd created wasn't accessible. While I got a REALLY good look at the CLI and deep dived to troubleshoot I found two things:

There is no ESXi CLI command to remove a troubled VVOL Storage Container:

esxcli storage vvol storagecontainer
Usage: esxcli storage vvol storagecontainer {cmd} [cmd options]

Available Namespaces:
  abandonedvvol         Operations on Abandoned Virtual Volumes.

Available Commands:
  list                  List the VVol StorageContainers currently known to the ESX host.

Yep, just list, darn it! I was able to list the fe*ked container but could do nothing with it! 

Second, sometimes it's better to start all over again. I deleted what I could in VMware, removed the iSCSI Target to the Nimble appliance and unregistered the Nimble management interface with vCenter which also pulls out the VASA provider with it. Then rebooted the ESXi host as it was still showing up the Protocol Endpoint. If in doubt, start over! Then I got somewhere!

The Nimble appliance has an interface that sets up the VASA Provider and Web Plugin here:

The Thick client isn't going to help you with vCenter 6.5 but it's there anyway for older versions. I'm on Nimble OS 4.5 and they've since released 5.0 just to note. 

So in vCenter you can check your VASA Provider by bringing up the vCenter configure tab as shown here:

 This is with the Lab Group selected:

This area is very important as you may need to kick, sorry, refresh the VASA provider when you're pulling you hair out. You can choose a rescan or sync option. The Nimble logs as in /var/logs/nimble if you're bored and want to tail something. 

Here is the iSCSI view of the PE (Protocol Endpoint) after I'd created a VVOL folder in Nimble:

You can see the 512 Byte volume on LUN 0 which is the PE. The other Targets are my offline StoreVirtual, ignore those! 

Now you can create a VVOL and hope everything works as expected. If not rescan Storage, rescan Adapter etc etc. I created a small VVOL and Storage vMotioned a CentOS VM onto it:

I took a snapshot and then viewed the VM through the Nimble interface. The snap took 10 minutes to complete but that's most likely due to my Lab. But the Veeam backup snapshot only took a few seconds! Here's the interesting pictures:

This is the contents of the VVOLS1/CentOS folder:

Here is the view via Nimble:

What's surprising to me is that there's only 5 files.....even after a snapshot is taken. The memory snapshot is listed but not the disk snapshot. And what about all the other files?!!

Here is Veeam backup job:

Here are the available storage policies that Nimble makes available:

So you can choose to expose encryption and deduplication options to vCenter Admins. 

By the way Google "vSphere Virtual Volumes Technical Overview" - there a paper dated January 2018 worth reading. Or try this link if it works:

https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi8jszXjJTZAhUsIMAKHcCPCIMQFggpMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fstoragehub.vmware.com%2Fexport_to_pdf%2Fvsphere-virtual-volumes-technical-overview&usg=AOvVaw0djZ5g0zcRqRi-0iDRiutC

Next have a look at what happens after I take a second snapshot that includes memory (and it still took 10 minutes):

There's the two snaps, 1.6GB each: 

As third snap, taken without the VMs memory makes NO change to the Nimble view. 

So, according to the PDF there are meant to be 5 VVol objects:

(Taken from the VMware PDF referenced earlier)

So what CAN we see? The Config VVol is the first one listed in Nimble, then you have the Memory-VVol, the two Snapshot VVols are only present when you choose to snap the memory and the Data-VVol is the vmdk as listed. The last VVol is the Cluster HA folder so it's nice to know it can use VVols too! 

Now, about those Snapshots. Why don't we see these in Nimble? Well, we do, kinda - watch the last column on the right:

I can also create a local snapshot directly on the Nimble. You can view all the snapshots here. Note it doesn't expose the Nimble snapshot up to vCenter:

Now, let's delete it and restore using Veeam! 

And we're back up and running:

Snapshot free of course! Thanks Veeam!

Now to create a Clone - I can power on the CentOS2 clone and view the space usage. Nimble appears to take care of the DeDup and uses a small snap:

 There 7.4MB snap is shown below:

CentOS2 otherwise uses NO space! Nice!

So, I've had a little play and done the basics. Replication / DR would be the next level but I'm not going there yet. It's more seamless than I thought and maybe Storage Policies are the way to go? With everything moving to flash, with dedup and encryption as standard is there much left to choose apart from the protection level / replication? 

Hope this gave you an insight into VVols and you found it useful.