Ask an OpenShift Admin Office Hour - SPLAT and the vSphere Problem Detector

Deploying OpenShift on vSphere, Azure, or AWS? We want to introduce you to SPLAT, the team that works hard to deliver OpenShift anywhere and everywhere. This week, we welcome SPLAT team members Richard Vanderpool and Joe Callen to talk about their role in the development and support of OpenShift. We’ll also talk about the vSphere Problem Detector, an Operator which, as the name implies, checks for, identifies, and sometimes rectifies known problems with OpenShift on vSphere clusters.

Who is the SPLAT team? OpenShift supports many different infrastructure types - AWS, Azure, vSphere, RHV, bare metal, etc. - and each one has different capabilities, features, and quirks. The OpenShift Specialist PLATform team is a group of specialists who focus on each of the infrastructure providers with a deep understanding of both.

As always, please see the list below for additional links to specific topics, questions, and supporting materials for the episode!

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Episode 29 recorded stream:

Supporting links for today:

• Use this link to jump directly to where we start talking about today’s topic
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 is generally available! You can find some “what’s new” blog posts here and a very helpful on-demand webinar here.
• The OpenShift Subscription and Sizing Guide has been updated with more details on the Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus entitlement and clarification on what does / does not affect infrastructure node entitlements.
• In case you missed it, CVE-2021-30465 (Symlink-Exchange attach with runc) was announced. Please monitor the security bulletin for additional details as they develop!
• If the KCS and documentation conflict, which one do you trust more? What role does the KCS play when compared to the documentation? We talk about these questions during the stream and discuss the complimentary role they play. 

Questions answered during the stream:

• Did you know that you can link directly to almost every heading in the documentation? We show how to discover the missing section IDs here during the stream. This can be very useful when you’re trying to show or explain a specific part of the documentation to someone!
• SPLAT is an escalation point for engineering when they want to understand how OpenShift on an infrastructure platform works. What does that actually mean? What does a day in the life of a SPLAT team member look like?
• Some details on the OpenShift on vSphere CI system! Did you know that we test every build of OpenShift on vSphere using VMC?
• If you’re interested in details of the VMXNET3 issue that caused a delay in OpenShift 4.6 -> 4.7 upgrades, we talk about it here.
• The SPLAT team is responsible for identifying and fixing many platform specific issues. One of the recent outcomes of this effort is the Triaging OpenShift performance on VMware KCS, which provides an in-depth set of steps and data to collect to assist with identifying performance issues that are suspected to be at the hypervisor layer.
• The vSphere Problem Detector, which was created by the storage team and is new with OpenShift 4.7, finds and proactively fixes problems that can lead to issues with OpenShift on vSphere.
• Is vMotion supported with OpenShift 4? Yes! We test and validate it with every build, including a vMotion stress test. If you experience issues with your OpenShift cluster during or after a vMotion operation, be sure to review VMware’s best practices for vMotion configuration to ensure there are no resource contention or starvation issues.