I have really been enjoying messing about with my NanoLab for the past few days and it has already proved invaluable in a couple of projects I’m dealing with at work (mainly in testing some ideas I had for solutions).
These are just a couple of very quick tips for your NUC lab which I came across throughout the week. They will also apply to any other single NIC configuration for a vSphere cluster (e.g. HP Microserver with no extra PCI card), and for booting your cluster from a USB pen drive.
The tips are both simple fixes to remove the (slightly annoying) warning messages you get on each ESXi host in your cluster after you do your initial config.
Single Management NIC Causes Warning in vCenter
The host currently has no management network redundancy.
To get rid of this (assuming you dont plan to add further NICs), simply follow KB1004700, which is summarised as follows:
To suppress this message on ESXi/ESX hosts in the VMware High Availability (HA) cluster, or if the warning appears for a host already configured in a cluster, set the VMware HA advanced option das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning to true and reconfigure VMware HA on that host.
To set das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning to true:
- From the VMware Infrastructure Client, right-click on the cluster and click Edit Settings.
- Select vSphere HA and click Advanced Options.
- In the Options column, enter das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning
- In the Value column, enter true.
Note: Steps 3 and 4 create a new option. - Click OK.
- Right-click the host and click Reconfigure for vSphere HA. This reconfigures HA.
Booting from USB Pen Drive Causes Warning
System logs on host <hostname> are stored on non-persistent storage
This is caused by booting from the USB device. It is very simple to remove by redirecting logs to a syslog server. A prime example for your home lab would be the syslog server which comes as standard with the vCenter Server Appliance, but commonly your home NAS may have this functionality, you could run a Linux VM to collect the logs, or alternatively you could use a great product to centralise logs called Splunk (free for up to 500mb of logs per day!).
To point your ESXi hosts to any syslog server, simply:
- From the VMware Infrastructure Client, select the host.
- Select the Configuration tab, then click Advanced Settings.
- In the left column expand Syslog, then click global.
- In the right panel, in the Syslog.global.logHost box, enter the IP or hostname of your syslog server.
- Click OK.
- Your host is now configured to forward all logs to your syslog server and the non-persistent storage error will be suppressed.
Once you have enabled the redirection you also need to open the outbound port on your ESXi hosts (thanks to Sam for the reminder).
- From the VMware Infrastructure Client, select the host.
- Select the Configuration tab, then select Security Profile.
- Next to Firewall, click Properties…
- Scroll down to syslog and tick the check box to open ports 514/1514.
- Click OK.
If anyone else comes across any useful NUC related homelab tips, please feel free to comment or mail them to me and I’ll add them to the list.
UPDATE: Duncan Epping describes the das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning fix on his blog, using the vSphere Web Client here:
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2015/05/21/this-host-currently-has-no-network-management-redundancy/
Other parts of this article may be found here:
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 1
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 2
VMware vSphere NanoLab – Part 4 – Network and Storage Choices
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