Back in December 2015, I published an article announcing the release of the Virtual SAN content pack for vRealize Log Insight. In the article, I delved into some of the key details of what the content pack delivers with the ability to automate the management of Virtual SAN logs. The product’s ability to combine the aggregation of analytics, together with search capabilities it provides operational intelligence and enterprise-wide visibility into dynamic environments with Virtual SAN.
Today, a new version of the Virtual SAN content pack for vRealize Log Insight is available. The new version includes several new artifacts that have been added to cover and support changes that were introduced in the latest release of Virtual SAN, version 6.2.
One of the many changes added in Virtual SAN 6.2 was the ability to collect urgent system messages from the trace files. While this may sound trivial and maybe even not so significant. On the contrary, it is in fact not trivial, and very important. If you use and know Virtual SAN, I hope you know that when it comes to storing information about operational failures, the health of objects, and storage devices is done on to the Virtual SAN trace files.
The Virtual SAN trace files are always compressed into a binary and non-human readable format. Extracting and retrieving information about critical and urgent events such as operation failures, the health of Virtual SAN’s components and storage devices can be a tough and challenging operational process for Virtual SAN customers to deal with.
The behavior described above was changed in the latest release of Virtual SAN. Now, in Virtual SAN 6.2 (only) trace files are automatically decompressed, converted to a human readable format, and written to Syslog. Now that the trace files will be uncompressed and made accessible in the Syslog, urgent messages are available for consumption and can be retrieved by the new version of the Virtual SAN Content Pack for vRealize Log Insight.
The new version of the content pack includes three new function tabs and thirteen new filter widgets which are briefly described below:
Operations Failures
this feature tab contains a number of default filters and widgets for Virtual SAN operation related functions. For detailed information beyond the information presented in the widgets, use the interactive analysis view to look at any particular status message.
- VSAN – Operation took too long – Total number of events for VSAN operation failures because the operation took too long to complete. An increase in the number of events indicates network instability, diskgroup failures or an issue with the environment.
- VSAN – Create operation failure – Object configuration failure – Total number of events for VSAN create operation failure due to object configuration failures. The status field in the log message will provide more information about the reason for the object configuration failure.
- VSAN – Ingress congestion – Total number of events for VSAN object creation failures because of memory congestion. An increase in the number of events indicates too many outstanding operations or lack of memory within the cluster. Possible measures would be to reduce the load on the host. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2071384
- VSAN – Resync operation start – Total number of events for VSAN resynchronization start operations. An increase in the number of events may happen due to policy changes initiated by the user or due to host, storage or network failures.
- VSAN – Object component creation failure – Total number of events for VSAN DOM component creation failures. An increase in the number of events indicates network instability within the cluster. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2058368
Health
this feature tab contains some default filters and widgets for Virtual SAN that are looking and monitoring the health of the Virtual SAN components and storage devices (SSD, HDD).
- VSAN – Disk health change – Total number of events for VSAN disk health change events to a state other than healthy. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2004684
- VSAN – SSD health change – Total number of events for VSAN SSD health change events to a state other than healthy. An increase in the number of events indicates an issue with the SSDs belonging to the VSAN cluster.
- VSAN – Component health change – Total number of events for VSAN component health change events to unhealthy state. An increase in the number of events indicates network, storage or host failures in the VSAN cluster. The errorCode field in the log message will provide more information about the reason for the component health change to unhealthy state.
Object Events
this feature tab contains some default filters and widgets for Virtual SAN that indicate any state changes any particular Virtual SAN object.
- VSAN – Object component state – Degraded – Total number of events indicating VSAN object state change to degraded state. An increase in the number of events on hosts indicates disks failing or network partition in the VSAN cluster. Disks that go into permanent error will not be accepted by the VSAN cluster. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2004684 http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2058368
- VSAN – Object component state – Absent – Total number of events indicating VSAN object state change to absent state. An increase in the number of events on hosts indicates disks getting decommissioned or network partition in the VSAN cluster.
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2058368 - VSAN – Object component state – Stale – Total number of events indicating VSAN object state change to stale state. This indicates VSAN objects not being up to date. An increase in the number of events on hosts indicates storage failures or network partition in the VSAN cluster.
- VSAN – Object component state – Resyncing – Total number of events indicating VSAN object state change to resyncing state. An increase in the number of events on hosts indicates all copies of objects getting up to date.
- VSAN – Object lost liveness – Total number of events indicating VSAN objects losing liveness. An increase in the number of events on hosts indicates network or host failures in the VSAN cluster.
You can download or upgrade the Virtual SAN Content Pack directly from the vRealize Log Insight Marketplace.
-Enjoy
For future updates on Virtual SAN (VSAN), vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVol) and other Storage and Availability technologies, as well as vSphere Integrated OpenStack (VIO), and Cloud-Native Applications (CNA) be sure to follow me on Twitter: @PunchingClouds.
