Tango Eagle Bravo

*Coming to a vSAN support call near you*

“Sir, It looks like Tango Eagle Bravo is the problem”.

 

Why does this sound like something out of a Nickolas Cage movie? Let me explain.

Today vSAN out of the box can phone home Performance, Configuration, and health telemetry to support and engineering using the vSAN Support Insight functionality. Note this phone home data builds an obfuscation map by default so that hostnames, virtual machine names, and network information are not exposed in the phone home. By using your vCenter UUID support and engineering can further drill into the environment and diagnose many common issues without necessarily needing a full manual log collection.

If you want to inspect a sample of what it looks like you can read through this JSON file here.

What happens when Support finds an issue and explains the secret code name for the Virtual Machine or host that is the problem? Where do you find a secret decoder ring to make sense of this?

In the vSphere Web Client, navigate to the vSAN Cluster > Configure > vSAN > Health and Performance > Online Health Check. Click on the Download Obfuscation Map

In the CLI on the VCSA?

  1. SSH into vCenter Server Appliance.
  2. Run command: cd /var/log/vmware/vsan-health/
  3. The obfuscation mapping file is <uuid>_obfuscationTableForHuman.json.gz.
  • Windows Environment:
    1. Login to Windows vCenter Server machine.
    2. Open C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\logs\vsan-health
    3. The obfuscation mapping file is <uuid>_obfuscationTableForHuman.json.gz.

What if you are not phoning home CEIP data? 

It’s time to turn it on. It’s less information than a normal log collection would include, and by having it phone home regularly you are in a better situation to get faster support should you need it. For setup and network requirements check out this storage hub section.

What happens if you do not have compliance needs to speak in code, and would rather VMware just have direct access to your Virtual machine and Hostnames? You can email, or upload and attach it to the ticket. Support can bind this in vSAN Support Insight, but it will expire in 7 days.

 

 

What is in the obfuscation map?

Here is a sample.map file.