Dell VxRail Health Check with VxVerify Tool
VxVerify is designed to be used after initial VxRail deployments and before upgrades, to proactively identify issues that could lead to complications or failures. I always recommend checking the cluster with VxVerify before making any further adjustments, such as customising the cluster or upgrading to vSphere/VxRail 8 for example.
This tool unpacks so-called minions during execution, which are running on each ESXi in the cluster. Those minions are performing several host specific tests, but also VxRail Manager checks, vSAN health checks and they are even identifying ISO files, which are still attached to VMs.
VxVerify Data Flow:
Important: You need a Dell account to download VxVerify!
Let’s start with – How to get access to VxVerify. After successfully logging into the Dell portal, you will be taken to the VxVerify page, which describes how to use VxVerify, where to download it and, most importantly, which version to use. Regardless of the target VxRail version, use the VxVerify version appropriate for the VxRail version you are upgrading from. This is the Link:
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000021527
There are 3 VxVerify Versions:
- VxVerify 1 .xx.xxx is for VxRail 4.0 only (contact Dell Support if this is required).
- VxVerify 2 .xx.xxx is for VxRail 4.5, 4.7 & 7.0.000.
- VxVerify 3 .xx.xxx is for VxRail 7.0.010+ (different versions are necessary due to the move to Python 3.6 from 2.7, in VxRail 7.0.010 and later.
No sooner said than done, just choose the right version from the Downloads section, download and unzip it.
Important: The current version of VxVerify is 3.30.915 and will expire within 21 days of the release date, so make sure you get the latest version!
My VMware vExpert peers David Ring and Piotr Tarnawski have already described the Python Script way, which can be started directly with the attached vxverify_3-30-915.pyc file.
I will describe the way via the vxverify.sh file, which is also accessing the python script, but it is more user friendly. 🙂
First, connect to the VxRail Manager using WinSCP (or another tool) and log in as mystic. Then upload the extracted files to the /tmp/vxv/ folder. VxVerify should run in the /tmp/vxv/ folder by default, if it does not exist, create it accordingly.
# optional if there is no /vxv/ folder
mkdir /tmp/vxv After the upload, connect via SSH to the VxRail Manager, log in again as mystic and optionally change to the root user. Now you have to set permissions on the /vxv/ folder to make the vxverify.sh file executable.
# make the content of the folder
chmod 777 /tmp/vxv
# or make the file executable, if you are not root use sudo
chmod 777 vxverify.sh
# change to the /vxv folder
cd /tmp/vxv 
Otherwise you will get the following message:
bash: ./vxverify.sh: Permission denied
After the proper permission assignment you can execute the vxverify.sh file by:
./vxverify.sh
The Python script starts the health check immediately, while the vxverify.sh file gives you a menu with several options as you can see here:
In my case, it was an initial 3-node cluster deployment and I want a General Health Check, so #3. Prior to deployment, you will be asked if you would like to provide the credentials for vCenter SSO and vCenter root.
After a very short time, the above-mentioned Minions are already rolled out on the respective ESXi hosts:
Once the check is done, you get a detailed output about it, if something is not running properly in the cluster and as I said up to the VM level. This output can also be found in the /vxv/ folder as a .txt file. Let us now go into the details.
In our case there is nothing conspicuous in the LCM Log analysis, in the turquoise area we can see how our VxRail environment was built and which versions components are isntalled, incl. the FQDN for the vCenter and VxRail Manager.
In the next section we see the main components of the environment and how many tests have run, if there are any failures or warnings, you can see them here. In this cluster we have a DNS server VM running on ESX02 with the ISO image still connected – 😉 – but otherwise the environment is running fine so far.
I also want to highlight an important detail about VxVerify and that is that you can see under the Health Checks additionally when the current VxVerify version expires and how long the check took.
Last but not least you will get hints where to find which files to send them to the Dell support.
So a powerful and important tool, which I can only recommend to everyone. As I mentioned above, directly after the inital deployment or shortly before the upgrade, run VxVerify and save yourself a lot of troubleshooting!
If you have a VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell VxRail solution in use, there is a separate procedure for this, which I will describe very soon. That’s it from this post, if you have any questions leave a comment below. 🙂