The landscape of VxRail software is ever-evolving. As software releases become available, so too do new features and functions. These new features and functions create a more robust ecosystem, focusing on simplifying regular tasks that appear mundane but are critical to maintaining a secure, up-to-date, and healthy IT environment. VxRail 7.0.480 brought several new and enhanced capabilities to administrators, continuing to build on the streamlined infrastructure management experience that VxRail offers. Many of these improvements are part of the LCM experience. Let’s take a moment to discuss some of these new software improvements and what they can do for infrastructure staff. These include expanded storage of update advisor reports from one report to thirty reports, the ability to export compliance reports to preservable files, automated node reboots for clusters, and extended ADC bundle and installer metadata upload functionality for improved prechecking and update advisor reporting.  

Extended update advisor report availability 

Administrative teams have likely seen various update advisor reports. These reports have been part of the VxRail LCM experience for the past few releases and present a look at theFigure 1. A view of the pane showing multiple update advisor reports available for review cluster as it is at the moment. That said, storing multiple reports helps provide a documented history of the cluster. VxRail 7.0.480 has taken these singular reports and extended their storage to hold up to thirty reports, granting administrators the information and reporting to review up to the last thirty updates. 

Imagine that you have a large cluster. Different nodes could need different remediating actions. The ability to maintain multiple reports would enable administrators to address issues raised in a report while also creating a documentation trail for when corrective actions take multiple administrative cycles spanning extended lengths of time, possibly exceeding a day.

Export of compliance drift reports

Compliance drift reports are another reporting element of the LCM process, helping administrators to ensure that clusters conform with a Continuously Validated State (CVS) on a daily basis. This frees up administrators to attend to business-specific tasks, while ensuring that the more mundane work of gathering software versions for review is automated. This is a critical task that helps prevent time-intensive infrastructure issues that IT teams need to dedicate resources to correcting. Additionally, these reports ensure that LCM updates are successful by identifying any components that may have drifted from what is defined by the current Continuously Figure 2. The option to export a drift report to a local HTML fileValidated State. 

These compliance drift reports, demonstrated to the right, can now be exported, aiding administrators in creating and maintaining a documented history of their clusters' adherence to Continuously Validated States. Each report can be grouped by components and is saved to an HTML file, preserving the original view that VxRail administrators have come to know. 

Sequential node reboot

Our next new feature automates the sequential reboot of nodes within a cluster, a task that many customers engage in manually. The automatic node reboot function is found within the Hosts submenu in the Configure tab. As shown in the following demonstration, administrators simply select the nodes they want to reboot, click the reboot button, and then complete the wizard. The wizard offers the options to begin rebooting immediately or schedule them for a later time. Once this selection is made, the wizard will run a precheck, and the reboot cycles can begin. While this feature most benefits larger clusters, clusters of any size are advantaged by automating infrastructure tasks. Node reboots can help further improve update cycle success rates by clearing issues like memory utilization or restarting any potentially hung processes. 

As an example, let’s consider memory utilization again. If there were an issue with the balloon driver making memory available, the update precheck would detect it, however rebooting the node would restart the service and force the memory to be made available once again. We’ve also observed cases where larger clusters are updated less often compared to smaller clusters due to longer maintenance windows. This can lead to longer times between reboots for larger clusters. The sequential reboot of nodes within a cluster eases the difficulty in restarting larger clusters through automation and orchestration, leading to restarts with minimal administrator activity. This can clear a variety of issues that could halt an upgrade.

That said, manually rebooting each node within a cluster can require a significant time investment. Imagine for a moment that we have a 20-node cluster. If it took just 10 minutes per node to migrate workloads away from a node, restart the host, bring it back online physically and relaunch software services, and finally bring workload back, cycling through all 20 nodes would still take over three hours of an administrator's undivided attention and time. In reality, this reboot cycle would likely take longer. Automating these actions allows clusters to benefit from these actions while freeing IT staff up to focus on other critical business tasks.

ADC bundle and installer metadata upload

VxRail 7.0.480 brings the ability to use the adaptive data collector (ADC) bundle and installer metadata, shown being uploaded in the following demonstration, to update the LCM precheck and update advisor functions VxRail Manager provides. This is helpful because the precheck routinely welcomes new developments, leading to a more robust precheck and more successful LCM update cycles. For example, one of the more recent precheck developments involves an additional check on memory utilization. The LCM precheck examines CPU and memory utilization of the vCenter Server appliance. If either CPU or memory utilization exceeds an 80% threshold, a warning will appear in the precheck report. If the check occurs as part of an upgrade cycle, then the warning appears in the update progress dashboard. The update advisor metadata file includes all the version information related to the target VxRail release version. This allows the update advisor to create reports showing the current, expected, and target software versions for each LCM cycle. These packages are pulled by VxRail Manager automatically over the network for clusters using a Secure Connect Gateway connection and are also available to offline dark sites using the Local Updates tab.

Conclusion

The VxRail engineering team routinely delivers new features and functions to our customers. In this blog, we reviewed the enhancements for expanded update advisor report storage, the ability to export drift reports to local HTML files, automated cluster node reboot cycles, and the enhanced LCM precheck and update advisor with the ADC bundle and installer metadata file uploads. As we move forward, we continue to enhance LCM operations and minimize the time required to manage VxRail. As such, VxRail is a fantastic choice to run your virtualized workloads and will continue to become a more robust and administration-friendly platform.

Author: Dylan Jackson, Engineering Technologist