When we think about vSAN Ready Nodes from a Dell Technologies perspective, we provide a wide portfolio of platforms to choose from, both in terms of form factors and technical specifications. We can also offer ease of operations and life cycle management, which are made possible by the graceful integration of Dell EMC Open Manage Integration for VMware vCenter (OMIVV) with VMware’s vSphere lifecycle management (vLCM). 

But…is there anything else?

The answer is yes! Behind the scenes is a simple technology that enables the Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes platform to reach advanced levels of automation.

Let me introduce the Dell EMC Identity Module.

Our first contact with this interesting subject comes when we first connect to the underlying PowerEdge iDRAC interface. As shown in the following image, the iDRAC has spotted something.

Is there anything different in this Dell EMC R740XD vSAN Ready Node than what we could observe if instead we were seeing a standard PowerEdge R740XD? Indeed. That brief description of  the R740XD vSAN Ready Node makes the difference. We’ll get to that very soon.

As you may know, vCenter is the main management console for a VMware platform such as vSAN Ready Nodes. From vCenter, we can see a very similar description of our Ready Node:

What if we were just seeing a PowerEdge server, such as a PowerEdge MX740C?

No mention of Ready Node here, just a vanilla description of the server model. So, what’s the deal about that unique chassis identification provided by the Identity Module?

That particular text string enables any programmatic interface to locate and direct an operation to that specific set of infrastructure assets. A select type primitive from an automation platform may be able to pinpoint a Dell EMC vSAN Ready Node from other servers because it has an Identity Module. This means that if we have a 100-node server farm, in which 16 are, for example, Dell EMC R740XD vSAN Ready Nodes, and the rest are other server types without an Identity Module, we can easily direct any operation coming from an automation framework such as vRealize Orchestrator, Ansible, or Puppet to our Ready Nodes, and it will respond positively to any query that is looking for a vSAN Ready Node text string.

The Identity Module, as a unique chassis identification method, allows any programmatic operation to distinguish the ready node farm from the rest of the servers in the datacenter—a simple feature that enables such powerful automation. On top of this, from a support perspective, the Identity Module enables Dell teams to more rapidly triage and diagnose any system anomaly. This feature helps the more than 1.800 VMware certified Dell support engineers solve above 90% of the cases in-house, avoiding the need to route level 3 tickets to VMware. 

Consider it another technology tidbit that helps differentiate Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes from other similar offerings. 

To read more about Identity Modules driven automation, check out this blog (Tony’ blog on IDMod automation, when available).

For more technical information on Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes, check here.

Author Information

Inigo Olcoz, Senior Principal Engineering Technologist at Dell Technologies  

Twitter: @VirtualOlcoz

Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes have Identity Modules that act at the lowest level of a node and imbues a host with special features and characteristics. In this blog, we explore how to use the attributes of the Identity Module to automate tasks in a vSphere environment.

Let’s start out by identifying all the Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes in our environment and displaying some information about them, such as the BIOS version of each host and vSphere version. After we learn about the hosts in our environment, we will discover what VMs are running on those hosts. We’ll do all of this through VMware’s PowerCLI, which is a plug-in for Microsoft PowerShell.

Note: We could also easily do this using other tools for vSphere such as Python (with pyVmomi), Ansible, and many others.

The environment we are using is a small environment using three Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes R740 with identity modules. All three nodes are running  ESXi 7.0 U2 (vSAN 7.0 Update 2). VMware vSAN is using an all flash configuration. The code we are discussing in this post should work across current Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes and current vSphere releases.

The code displayed below may seem trivial, but you can use it as a base to create powerful scripts! This unlocks many automation capabilities for organizations. It also moves them further along in their autonomous operations journey. If you’re not familiar with autonomous operations, read this white paper to see where your organization is with automation. After reading it, also consider where you want your organization to go.

We’re not going to cover many of the things necessary to build and run these scripts, like connecting to a vSphere environment. There are many great blogs that cover these details, and we want to focus on the code for Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes.

In this first code block, we start by finding all the Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes in our environment. We use a ForEach-Object loop to do this.

Get-VMhost -State "connected" | ForEach-Object { 
     if ($_.ExtensionData.hardware.systemInfo.model.contains("vSAN Ready Node")){
         echo "================================================="
         echo "System Details"
         echo "Model: " $_.ExtensionData.hardware.systemInfo.model
         echo "Service Tag: " $_.ExtensionData.hardware.systemInfo.serialNumber
         echo "BIOS version: " $_.ExtensionData.hardware.biosInfo.biosVersion
         echo "ESXi build: " $_.ExtensionData.config.product.build 
     }
}

This code snippet assumes we have connected to a vSphere environment with the Connect-VIServer command. It then creates a view of all the hosts in the environment using the Get-VMhost command, the results of which are passed to the ForEach-Object loop using the | (pipe) symbol. We then loop through this view of hosts using a ForEach-Object command and look at the hardware.systemInfo.model property of each host. The object of focus, one of the discovered hosts, is represented by the $_ variable, and to access the properties of the host object, we use the ExtensionData property. We check each host with a conditional method, .contains(), added on to the end of the property we want to check. Using the .contains method, we check if the hardware.systemInfo.model contains “vSAN Ready Node”. This string is a property that is unique to Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes and the Identity Module. It’s set at the factory when the Identity Module is installed.

If the system is a Dell EMC vSAN Ready Node with an Identity Module, we then display information from the hardware.systemInfo and the hardware.biosInfo, specifically the system’s BIOS version. We also collect the vSphere build of the host using the config.product property of the host.

As we loop through each host, we only display these details for the Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes in the environment that have Identity Modules. This results in output similar to the following:

The remainder of the nodes are excluded from the output shown here:

PS C:> .\IDM_Script.ps1
=================================================
System Details
Model: 
PowerEdge R740 vSAN Ready Node
Service Tag: 
[redacted]
BIOS version:
 2.1.12
ESXi build: 
18538813
 

This provides relevant information that we can use to create automated reports about our environment. You can also use the script as the basis for larger automation projects. For example, when a new Dell EMC vSAN Ready node is added to an environment, a script could detect that addition, perform a set of tasks for new Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes, and notify the IT team when they are complete. These sample scripts can be used as a spark for your own ideas.

This next script uses the same for loop from before to find the hosts that are Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes and now looks to see what VMs are running on the host. From this example, we can see how the Identity Module is integral in automating the virtual environment from the hosts to the virtual machines.

Get-VMhost -state "connected" | ForEach-Object {
    if ($_.ExtensionData.hardware.systemInfo.model.contains("vSAN Ready Node")){
        echo "================================================="
 
        echo "System Details"
        echo "Model: " $_.ExtensionData.hardware.systemInfo.model
        echo "Service Tag: " $_.ExtensionData.hardware.systemInfo.serialNumber
        echo "BIOS version: " $_.ExtensionData.hardware.biosInfo.biosVersion
        echo "ESXi build: " $_.ExtensionData.config.product.build
        echo "+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++"
        echo "$_ list of VMs:"
        Get-VM -Location $_ | ForEach-Object{            
            echo $_.ExtensionData.name
        }
    }
} 

This new code snippet, shown in bold, builds on the previous example by looping through our hosts looking for the “vSAN Ready Node” as before. When it finds a matching host, it creates a new view using the Get-VM command, consisting of the virtual machines for that host. The host is specified using the -Location parameter, to which is passed the current host represented by the $_. We then use another ForEach-Object loop to display a list of VMs on the host.

This gives our code context. If an action is carried out, we can now define the scope of that action, not just on the host but on the workloads it’s running. We can start to build code with intelligence — extracting a greater value from the system, which in turn provides the opportunity to drive greater value for the organization.

As I said earlier, this is just the starting point of what is possible when building PowerCLI scripts for Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes with Identity Modules! Other automation platforms, like Ansible, can also take advantage of the identity module features. We only covered the basics, but there are enormous possibilities beyond discovery operations. The nuggets of knowledge in this blog unlock numerous opportunities for you to build automations that empower your data center.  

For more information see Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes overview and the Dell EMC VSAN Ready Nodes blog site.  

Author Information 

Tony Foster 

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