vSphere 5.x Tip To Toe: VMware VSA 5.3 Troubleshooting Scenario [1]
I’ve been recently involved in various VMware VSA implementations and I haven’t faced much problems with it, usually is something drastic happens to the vCenter server I would just reinstall the vCenter server and restore the VSA, but not yesterday ;-).
Sadly I don’t have screenshots to make this scenario more clear but I will explain the plain issue and then I will list what I have attempted:
Scenario:
Two VSA nodes, were powered off (I don’t know how they were powered off and most probably because they were powered off in a non conventional way this problem occurred) when I powered on the nodes, one of the VSA appliances was in maintenance mode and the other was orphaned and I couldn’t even remove it from the inventory, so basically I didn’t have access to any of the NFS datasotres and the situation was epic ;-).
Unsuccessful Troubleshooting attempts:
- Tried exiting the first appliance from the maintenance mode via the VSA Manager plugin interface.
- Tried restarting the first appliance several times.
Successful Troubleshooting attempts:
- As I didn’t have much options at the time, I disconnected the second host and removed it from the VSA cluster and then re-added it, also tt was noticeable that the NFS datastores were not present on it at all, not even showing as disconnected.
- Any way, I added the second VSA appliance to the inventory of the host and powered it on, and after it restarted a couple of time I noticed in the VSA manager that both appliances were now online and in maintenance mode.
- As I said earlier from the GUI I couldn’t get them out of the maintenance mode, so I did some research and got this nice article “Exiting VSA Maintenance Mode using WSCLI” from our trusty friend Cormac Hogan (@VMwareStorage), I used the WSCLI to exit both appliances from maintenance mode and you know it, IT WORKED.
- After both appliances exited the maintenance mode, I restarted each at a time and noticed that the synchronization process started between the VSAs.
- On the other hand, as I said earlier the NFS datastores on the second node weren’t present and in the VSA manager the datastores were showing as degraded, so I went to the first node and copied the NFS paths and added them to the first node manually, it worked and the everything in the VSA manager console went beautiful and green.
I don’t know whether the what I have done is supported by VMware or not, but it surely resolved my issues and I was able to get things running smoothly.
I truly hope this helps,(Abdullah)^2