Hi,
Last year we used HCIBench 2.3.1 on our vSAN cluster and now after adding some more hosts we're trying to run it again. Hweever, we have deleted out old VMs and we're not able to get the generated VMs to boot.

The hci-fio-datastore* VMs tries to PXE boot and then comes with the message Operating system not found.

Is there a way to either workaroud this problem in 2.5.3 or to download the old version?

Lars

did you get chance to pass the pre-validation?

this could be due to DNS or network issue.

I have run "validate config", but not pre-validation. Where can I find that option? Anyways.. The two clusters have the very same dns configuration and are connected to the same vCenter, so I'm not sure why the disks of the validation and test VMs are not getting partitioned so as the validation VMs aren't able to boot they will also not suffer from a potential dns problem as they currently are stuck at boot time.

Lars

to me it looks like network issue from hcibench to vcenter and/or esxi hosts.
could you run the validation again and send me the logs in /opt/automation/logs to vsanperformance@vmware.com?

The VM deployed on the 6.7 Intel clusters has partitions and is able to boot.
https://imgur.com/UEFvZKf

Booting a deployed validation VM using the Sysresccd iso shows that there are no partitions configured:
https://imgur.com/a/7uHLKvE

We also have an old vSAN cluster that is being phased out. It has a lot of Intel hosts with ESXi 6.7U3. VMs are booting perfectly fine on this cluster.

The cluster we're planning to run HCIBench on has AMD EPYC hosts and is running ESXi 7.0U1 build 17551050.

Video of one of the VMs booting: https://youtu.be/DBG3OlEQy4U

Greetings to all,

We have a problem with HCIBench - or more accurately my companys security scanning software has a problem with it. We are using the latest version and it is running Apache Tomcat Version 8.5.4. However our scanners dont like that and want version 8.5.5.1 (released last year).

My question(s)

Can we update the Apache Version within the appliance? We tried but it failed for reasons that are unclear (I am not a linux specialist!)
Will there be a release of HCIBench soon that will contain Apache Tomcat 8.5.5.1 of later?
How often are new versions released?

Thank you,
Oisin

Solution: Firewall was blocking port 443 from generated VMs and HCIBench VM to ESXi hosts.

lemme find a way to help you upgrade Tomcat to 8.5.5.1. And ill put it into next release too, but it would be in another month.

If you can find a way to upgrade that would be brilliant!

Hi team,

first of all let me say thank you for such cool tool, it's pretty easy to deploy and to configure.

May I ask for some additional functions?

1.) Looks like the upgrade.sh script doesn't work when I used it to update from 2.5.2.to 2.5.3.
When I check the GitHub the script posted there doesn't be aware of the new release.

2.) I would like to have the ability to configure fio to use I/O latency settings like "latency_target", "latency_window" and "latency_percentage".
This would allow us to check how many IOPS a vSAN Cluster could process while maintaining a latency below "latency_target".

Would be really cool to get those function implemented in a future release.

Kind regards,
Ralf

Hi Ralf,

Appreciate your comments!
1.) since we tried best to keep the code on github to be the most recent, we always update the code there first then publish a new ova here, in this case, even the README on github not explicitly saying this is code of 2.5.3, but it should be the most recent ones.
2.) we allow user to upload the customized param file to hcibench, the downside of using latency_target is some vms may finish earlier and some vms may finish later, how we should summarize the results would become the challenges for us, i understand i/o perf distribution across the timeline would be way better presenting the perf than a single avg number, but it could be hard for some of the user to understand that. we talked about this particular param profile in the past vmworld session: https://www.vmworld.com/en/video-library/video-landing.html?sessionid=1586804181620001sFzb

thanks
Chen

Hello,

with older HCIBench versions (2.2.*) I never had problems. But with the 2.5.3 version the "Validation" and "Test Run" does nothing. No VM will be deployed. After some time the "Test run" dialog closed with message "* finished" but there was nothing... I redeploy the HCIBench Appliance but with the same behavior. If i deploy an old 2.2.1 version all runs fine. But I need to change the CPU number...

Has anybody an idea?

best regards,
Mike

Can you send us the log files form /opt/automation/logs to vsanperformance@vmware.com?