New fling: DRS Dump Insight H5 Plugin

VMware released a new fling, DRS Dump Insight H5 Plugin.

Summary:

The DRS Dump Insight H5 Plugin helps answer simple questions like

  • "Can I get all the recommendations made by DRS?"
  • "Why did DRS make a certain recommendation?"
  • "Why is DRS not making any recommendations to balance my cluster?"
  • "How is my custom affinity/anti-affinity rule affecting load balancing in my cluster?"
  • "If I have a policy defined in my cluster, how different would DRS load balancing be?"

When diagnosing Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster issues in vSphere, we look at vCenter server logs from the support bundle, including DrmDump files to find any clues. Analyzing DrmDumps is a slow and tedious process, is usually done by VMware support or Engineering teams for advanced debugging of algorithm related issues. This is because analyzing the dumps requires building a replayer module, for which one needs access to the source code. Another challenge is that the final DrmDump data is not in plain text format; it requires someone with an understanding of the source code to be able to make good sense of it.

There is an existing DRS Dump Insight fling, which can replay DrmDumps and provide useful information for debugging. However, Dump Insight requires users to manually upload relevant DrmDump files from the time when the issue occurred. With the DRS Dump Insight H5 Plugin, customers do not need to upload any DrmDump files, and can access all the anal yzed information from their vSphere HTML5 web client itself.

  • Once a customer installs the HTML5 plugin, a new DRS Dump Insight tab will be available under the “cluster -> monitor” view.
  • All the DrmDump files that are available for the given cluster are listed in the opening screen. Customers can select the dump file of their choice for analysis.
  • They can also select multiple dump files to be analyzed together.
  • After analysis, the tool shows the analysis for each dump file in a separate tab view.

Requirements:

VMware vSphere with vCenter Server appliance 6.5 and 6.7, a compatible VMware vSphere client (HTML5) - See vSphere Client (HTML5) and vSphere Web Client 6.5 FAQ for more details about the requirements for vSphere client (HTML5).

Note that this fling does not work with the vSphere HTML5 Client Fling.

Instructions:

  1. Check for the vCenter Server appliance version
  2. Download the appropriate plugin package for your vcenter version and unzip the package to folder '/usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-ui/plugin-packages/' inside your VCSA.
  3. Add the below advanced option to the cluster
        CompressDrmdumpFiles 0
  4. Restart the vsphere-ui service
    • service-control --stop vsphere-ui
    • service-control --start vsphere-ui
  5. Once installed, you can see the new “DRS Dump Insight” section under the “Monitor” tab for each Cluster.