VMware Cloud Foundation is a best-in-class fully integrated hybrid cloud platform, that includes compute, storage, networking, and security. This hybrid cloud platform with its ability to fully automate the SDDC (software defined data center) deployment and automate software updates, it is the most comprehensive SDDC solution from VMware. Day 2 operational tasks are also enhanced by a feature exclusive only to this hybrid cloud solution. In this blog I want to introduce you to the VMware Cloud Foundation SoS tool. SoS stands for Supportabilty and Serviceabilty. This amazing tool has many functions, some of which we will explore in this blog. The SoS tool is a CLI (Command Line Interface) tool that is included with the SDDC manager appliance built into Cloud Foundation.
The SoS Tool
To begin, let’s start with where the SoS tool is located and how to do a basic health check. To access it, you need to SSH into the SDDC manager control VM. This appliance VM will be located in the VMware Cloud Foundation management workload domain. (Highlighted below)
For this blog I’ll be using my favorite SSH tool, putty. Next you need to know the IP address of the SDDC manager control VM. In my lab this is located at 192.168.100.40. (Note: this is the default IP for the SDDC manager). The default login for the SDDC manager is root and the default password is vmware1234 as noted in the documentation. If your Cloud Foundation is deployed in production, be sure to change this password. Once you are logged into the SSH console, we will navigate to the /opt/vmware/sddc-support/ directory.
After running the ls command, you can see all the files listed in this directory. We are looking for the SoS tool. Let’s start by seeing what’s available in the tool. Run the following command.
./sos –help
You should see an output like the one below.
This will list all of the available options for running the SoS tool. Take note of all the different options available in the output on your screen. (Note: The screen shot below is unable to show everything.)
Health Check
Next, let’s try a health check to see how healthy the SDDC in my lab is.
I will run the SoS tool with the –heath-check option.
As you can see from the output the health check verifies Infrastructure Connectivity, Hardware Status, vSAN Status, NTP time, Services, Certificates, Etc. This is a great tool to give you a quick overview for the overall status of your SDDC. In my home lab I can see that one of the ESXi nodes is having an issue with NTP time. Its showing up YELLOW.
To figure out what’s wrong, I’ll dive in a little deeper. Each time you run the SoS tool it creates a folder and logs the output into the following location. /var/tmp/ Looking in this directory I can see a folder named healthcheck<DateTimeStamp>.There are 3 files in each folder. SOS.log, Health-results.json and heath-report.log. I’ll dive into the SOS.log file and see what I can find about this time issue. Looking at the logs I could find that the SoS tool was getting a time response from the other ESXi hosts. Here is a sample of the log for ESXi Host r1n2.
When I look further down the log I can see that the SoS tool did not get a time response from the ESXi host r1n3.
This happened because I have disabled the SSH service on that host. This caused the ESXi host to return the yellow warning.
As you can see from these examples the VMware Cloud Foundation SoS tool is a great addition to your day 2 operations tool belt. Now go try it out in your environment, and verify the health of your SDDC.
Below are some links to the documentation for the SoS tool.
VMware Cloud Foundation – SoS tool documentation
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/2.2/com.vmware.vcf.admin.doc_22/GUID-8B3E36D5-E98B-47CF-852A-8C96F406D6E1.html
