I've had free Xangati for ESX running in my environment for a week or so now and I wasn't sure if it was working correctly. I've read all the quickstart guides and manual and I'm going to show you how to properly setup the appliance and your vSphere environment and test out network throughput.
Let's go over the installation and how to setup your vSphere environment.
- Download the Xangati Appliance and Unzip it to your desktop or wherever you have a good network connection to vCenter because you are going to be moving around 1.3 GB of data. You should be left with a XESX folder with an OVF and some VMDKs
- Open up your vSphere Client and Click on File -> Deploy OVF Appliance...
- Choose your OVF file and begin the setup process
- When choosing a name, make sure you choose something that will correlate with the ESX server you are monitoring. For instance, if I have MyESXi04, I want to name my new appliance Xangati04
- Choose Thin Provisioning for the type of disk
- Do not worry about choosing the network port groups right now because we are going to change all of that.
- Click finish and wait about 5 or so minutes for the appliance to complete installation
- To make sure the Xangati appliance stays with the host we want to monitor we need to change some Cluster Settings
- Right Click the Cluster of ESX hosts and Edit Settings. Under the HA and DRS options, set this Xangati VM to disabled.
- We're not ready to power on the VM just yet. First we have to make sure our vSphere environment is ready so the appliance can capture network flows. We need to setup a promiscuous port group on every vSwitch/vDS/1000v we want to monitor. This will not inflict any security breaches or performance degradation within your environment. We are setting promiscuous mode to the port group and not the entire vSwitch. I setup a promiscuous port group for my VM traffic on the vNetwork Distributed Switch (Xangati-VM-Promiscuous), one on my management vSwitch to monitor management traffic and vMotion (Xangati-Management-Promiscuous), and one on my IP Storage switch to monitor NFS (Xangati-IPstorage-Promiscuous).
- Follow these instructions to correctly configure promiscuous port groups for a standard vSwitch
- Follow these instructions to correctly configure promiscuous port groups for a vNetwork Distributed Switch or Cisco Nexus 1000v
- Go back to your Hosts and Clusters view and let's configure the NICs for the Xangati VM. Click on Edit Settings for the VM and you will see that the VM comes with 4 NICs. Here is how I set it up in my case
- NIC1 / eth0 is going to be the management interface. I assigned that NIC to a portgroup that had a DHCP server (we can change this to a static IP later)
- NIC2,3,4 / eth1,2,3 were assigned each it's own promiscuous port group. one got Xangati-VM-Promiscuous, the other Xangati-Management-Promiscuous, and the last Xangati-IPstorage-Promiscuous
- DO NOT ASSIGN A SINGLE PROMISCUOUS PORT GROUP TO MORE THAN 1 NIC. This can lead to skewed values and duplicate data. If you have a left over NIC, just uncheck "Connected" and "Connect at Startup" under its properties.
- Now we're ready to power on the VM. Power it on and wait for a DHCP address to be assigned to eth0. Follow the initial setup and configuration as posted in this video below
- Start watching at 2:00
- At this point, you should see data starting to be collected by the Xangati Appliance.
- If you want to change your Appliance to a static IP or change the timezone, open the console of your Xangati Appliance and type in the username: setupip password: setupip
- In my case, I wasn't sure if I was getting all the correct data. I found it odd that I only had about 3-5mb/sec of average Network Bit Rate. So I wanted to test out some network throughput and see if the Xangati appliance saw it. I found this great how to on Testing Network throughput between VMware ESX Hosts by Simon Long on using iperf.
- I put iperf.exe on my physical desktop. Ran it as the server: iperf -s
- I put iperf.exe on a my play VM and made that the client and connecting to the iperf server by running: iperf -c 192.168.3.71 -t 180 -r
- I watched Xangati during the process and the amount of throughput on the VMs was equal to the In/Out Network Bit rRte as shown on the Xangati Appliance. Note, there is about a 1 min delay to real time events
- Before
- After
- iperf and it's stats
Now that you have it up and running, why don't you enter the Xangati $5000 contest that is running until September 15th 2010.