Perform What-If analysis on VMware Host failure with this new Free Utility from VMware Labs

There is new utility at VMware labs website, which allows to perform a what-if analysis in case there is a VMware Host failure. Possibility to simulate hos failure is not current feature of vSphere so this little service has some good reasons to exists. And who knows, perhaps it will make it to the vNext release of vSphere….

The tool's name is VM Resource and Availability Service and it displays the total VMs in your cluster, how many VMs would fail or how many VMs would have resource reduction etc…

The tool can identify:

• VMs would be safely restarted on different hosts
• VMs would fail to be restarted on different hosts
• VMs would experience performance degradation after restarted on a different host

In fact it's a web-based tool accessible through http://hasimulator.vmware.com/ where you're asked to upload a DRS dump file.

How to use it?

The authors provide a PDF where you can study in detail everything. I just wanted to quickly test, but it seems that some rather unusual steps are required. First you need to use the vCenter Server’s managed object browser (MOB) which I never actually use, unless there are some orphaned vCenter plug-ins which you want to remove.

You need to browse via the MOB.

First you need to fire up your web browser and go to this address:

https://IP_of_Your_vCenter/mob/?moid=group-d1

So in my case, my vCenter is at 10.10.7.28, so it's this:

https://10.10.7.28/mob/?moid=group-d1

Then click on the link next to the childEntity (in my case it's the “datacenter-2” link)

And then

Its the “group-h4″ which is our interest as we need to locate the log located at

/var/log/vmware/vpx/drmdump

which can be copied through the UI…

Once done you can select the scenario…

The utility is definitely useful, but the gathering of logs is quite cumbersome. I'd prefer more simple method….

Make sure that you read the PDF which you'll find as a help file when wanting to upload the drs dump…

The PDF also provides good readlines on how to read the results. There are some examples as well.

The engineers:

• Keith Farkas
• Manoj Krishnan
• Duncan Epping
• Rahul Chandrasekaran
• Jeevitha K

Enjoy…

Source: VMware Labs