I was recently playing around with vmkfstools, checking out a few things for one of our storage partners. I noticed that I was using some undocumented options to look at a few things, and thought I would share them with you here.

1. Display hosts which are actively using a volume

~ # vmkfstools –activehosts /vmfs/volumes/VNX-20
Found 1 actively heartbeating hosts on volume '/vmfs/volumes/VNX-20'
(1): MAC address 98:4b:e1:0a:24:d8

This option will show the management interface MAC address of any hosts which is actively using a datastore. This is exactly what vSphere HA uses to see if a host is still active. It walks through the heartbeat records on the VMFS and checks which are active. This might take a few moments to run as it has to wait for the heartbeat record to age and refresh. It then it displays the MAC address of the owner.

2. Display File Metadata, including Lock Information

~ # vmkfstools -D /vmfs/volumes/VNX-20/COR-XP-PRO/COR-XP-PRO.vmdk
Lock [type 10c00001 offset 236560384 v 44, hb offset 4091904
gen 6155, mode 0, owner 00000000-00000000-0000-000000000000 mtime 23668 nHld 0 n Ovf 0]
Addr <4, 558, 4>, gen 6, links 1, type reg, flags 0, uid 0, gid 0, mode 600
len 492, nb 0 tbz 0, cow 0, newSinceEpoch 0, zla 4305, bs 8192

Note that when you run this command, the information is also captured in the vmkernel.log. In fact, the vm-support log utility will run this command to capture this information in the log bundle:

~ # tail -f /var/log/vmkernel.log
2012-07-31T10:05:00.366Z cpu6:5140275)FS3: 171: <START COR-XP-PRO.vmdk>
2012-07-31T10:05:00.366Z cpu6:5140275)Lock [type 10c00001 offset 236560384 v 44, hb offset 4091904 gen 6155, mode 0, owner 00000000-00000000-0000-000000000000 mtime 23668 nHld 0 nOvf 0]
2012-07-31T10:05:00.366Z cpu6:5140275)Addr <4, 558, 4>, gen 6, links 1, type reg, flags 0×0, uid 0, gid 0, mode 600 len 492, nb 0 tbz 0, cow 0, newSinceEpoch 0 zla 4305, bs 8192
2012-07-31T10:05:00.366Z cpu6:5140275)FS3: 173: <END COR-XP-PRO.vmdk>

The owner field would again display the MAC address of the lock owner. All 0's in the owner field implies that the host which ran the vmkfstools command owns the lock. The mtime field gives you an indication on whether the lock is getting updated or not.

3. VMDK Block Mappings

This command is very useful for displaying the mappings of VMFS file blocks to a VMDK. It can also be used to display the layout of a VMDK if you are concerned that a thin provisioned VMDK might be fragmented from a block allocation perspective.

~ # vmkfstools -t0 /vmfs/volumes/VNX-20/COR-XP-PRO/COR-XP-PRO.vmdk
Mapping for file /vmfs/volumes/VNX-20/COR-XP-PRO/COR-XP-PRO.vmdk (21474836480 bytes in size):
[0:   157286400] –> [VMFS -- LVID:4f438ba4-a4d98058-16d5-984be10a24d8/4f438ba3-53edb654-b1b1-984be10a24d8/1:(33206304768 -->  33363591168)]
[157286400:    51380224] –> [VMFS -- LVID:4f438ba4-a4d98058-16d5-984be10a24d8/4f438ba3-53edb654-b1b1-984be10a24d8/1:(33153875968 -->  33205256192)]
[208666624: 21266169856] –> [VMFS -- LVID:4f438ba4-a4d98058-16d5-984be10a24d8/4f438ba3-53edb654-b1b1-984be10a24d8/1:(33363591168 -->  54629761024)]

The first set of numbers are the VMDK block mappings, and the second set of numbers at the end of the line are VMFS block mappings. In my setup, even though the range of VMFS blocks seem contiguous, they map to the VMDK in a different order:

• VMDK chunk 0 -> VMFS chunk 1 (150MB)
• VMDK chunk 1 -> VMFS chunk 0 (49MB)
• VMDK chunk 2 -> VMFS chunk 2 (~2TB)

The double dashes between the VMFS & LVID  represent features of the VMDK. For example, an upper-case Z represents a lazy zeroed VMDK chunk, and an R would represent a read-only chunk. The long numbers following LVID represent the Device UUID and the VMFS UUID respectively. The /1 is the snapshot ID and is incremented when the volume is resignatured.

The VMFS UUIID can also be observed using the esxcli storage vmfs extent list command which shows both the VMFS UUID and NAA ID (SCSI identifier).

The -t0 option can only be pointed at VMDK files. To look at attributes of other files on a VMFS volume, the -p0 option can be used.

4. Display VMFS File Block Details

~ # vmkfstools -P -v10 /vmfs/volumes/VNX-20
VMFS-5.54 file system spanning 1 partitions.
File system label (if any): VNX-20
Mode: public
Capacity 209648091136 (199936 file blocks * 1048576), 88965382144 (84844 blocks) avail
Volume Creation Time: Tue Feb 21 12:18:44 2012
Files (max/free): 130000/129954
Ptr Blocks (max/free): 64512/64379
Sub Blocks (max/free): 32000/31994
Secondary Ptr Blocks (max/free): 256/256
File Blocks (overcommit/used/overcommit %): 0/115092/0
Ptr Blocks  (overcommit/used/overcommit %): 0/133/0
Sub Blocks  (overcommit/used/overcommit %): 0/6/0
UUID: 4f438ba4-018084e0-11a1-984be10a24d8
Partitions spanned (on "lvm"):
        naa.6006048cb898fa77617c749e6aef2e5b:1
DISKLIB-LIB   : Getting VAAI support status for /vmfs/volumes/VNX-20
Is Native Snapshot Capable: NO
~ #

This is a useful command to see how many file, pointer and sub-blocks on a VMFS are available and consumed. It is also a nice way to get VMFS version and extent count information as well as the file block size. Although this is now 1MB (1048576) in newly created VMFS-5, it could be 1,2,4 or 8MB in VMFS-3 or VMFS-5 upgraded from VMFS-3.

Useful options – I'm not sure why we hide them.

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