A few days ago Scott Lowe asked me which tools I use to deliver a health check engagement. A health check is a standard VMware PSO engagement, a VMware Consultant will be on site to check the status of your environment and will draw up a report.

I personally use the following tools:

• Health Check script by A.Mikkelsen → for a quick overview of the current situation and setup, small files and easy to carry around, runs from the Service Console.
• VMware Health Analyzer Appliance → A linux appliance that can connect to your VC/ESX and analyze log files. At this point in time it’s only available for VMware Employees or Partners with access to Partner Central.
• Powershell: Report into MS Word → Alan Renouf created this great reporting powershell scripts. It dumps info into a word document. (And i’ve heard he’s also working on a Visio export)
• Powershell: Health Check Script → Create an html report with datastore, cpu, memory and snapshot info… and more.
• RVTools → Gives a quick overview of current VM setup like snapshots, memory, cpu etc.
• Common sense → I hardly encounter really huge problems, mainly decreased availability cause of choices made during implementation / design phase without following VMware’s guidelines. Use common sense is the best advise in this case and read the best practice documents and VMware’s collection of pdf’s!
• And when there are some disturbing errors in one of the various log files you have the option to run it through one of the many toolkits we internally have.

I’m not using the following tools actively during engagements because of licensing but they can be very usefull in your enviroment:

• Replicate Datacenter Analyzer → Analyze your VI3 environment, I wrote an article a few weeks ago on RDA, click here
• Veeam Monitor → Monitor your VI3 environment including performance graphs etc.
• Veeam Reporter → A reporting tool, which will come in handy when documenting environments and comparing the current config to an old config.
• Vizioncore vFoglight → Might come in handy when doing analyses of trends and pinpointing resource contention.
• Tripwire Configcheck → Analyze the security of your VMware ESX environment. Check my blog post on Configcheck here.

I was just pointed out to this amazing topic on the VMTN Forums by William Lam and Tuan Duong. These guys created a whole bunch of scripts and decided to share them with the rest of the world:

My colleague (Tuan Duong) and I (William Lam) have been working on a virtualization/VDI deployment project over the last six months. The result of this work is a set of scripts that assist in provisioning and managing the server and lab environment for the Residential Networking Services (ResNet) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

We took the approach of developing scripts that would be free in nature to support a variety of offerings that currently exist in the enterprise space. One such tool that we would like to share with the VMware community is our Linked Clones script that was developed at the beginning of the summer of 2008. This script functions similarly to the View Composer component in the recent release of VMware View 3 but with relatively relaxed requirements.

A description and more details of the Linked Clones script can be found at:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9020

Another script that complements the Linked Clone’s script is our custom management script “*my-vmware-cmd*” which can be found at:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9061

An example of our implementation of these scripts can be found at:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9201

We also have other scripts and resources that have been consolidated onto a webpage and would like to share it:

http://www.engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/

We hope that the community finds some of these scripts to be useful in aiding VI administrators to manage their virtual infrastructure and look forward to any feedback that is provided.

Thanks
William lamw and Tuan tlduong

Check these scripts out if you’re looking for a linked clone solution on a non View Composer environment. Their website also contains a bunch of scripts, tips and tricks. One that really stands out is the RDM script, believe me this is a must have for your toolkit:

Download: rdm.sh – 11/03/08
Compatiable with: ESX 3.5+ and ESXi

This script is used to locate all virtual machines that have an RDM mapping and provides the VMs Name, Hard Disk label shown on the VIC/VC, Datastore, LUN UUID, HBA/LUN, Compatibility Mode (Phys/Virt), DiskMode and Capacity.

I had to prepare a meeting on virtualizing Exchange 2007 on a VMware VI3.5 environment. While searching the internet I found an enormous amount of pdf’s and whitepapers and decided to share them with you:

VMware.com:

• Deploying Microsoft Exchange in VMware Infrastructure
• 16,000 Exchange Mailboxes, 1 Server – VMware VROOM!
• Virtualization Solutions for Exchange Server 2007
• Advantages of Virutalizing Exchange 2007 with VMware® Infrastructure 3
• EMC Virtual Solution for Exchange 2007
• Migrating from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 on VMware Infrastructure 3
• HP Performance Paper: Exchange 2007 on VI3
• Dell Performance Paper: Exchange 2003 on VMware and EMC Storage
• Dell Article: Virtualizing MS Exchange Server 2007
• EqualLogic Performance Paper: Storage Solution for Exchange 2007
• Best Practices: Deploying MS Exchange on VMware
• Technical FAQ: EMC Virtual Solution for Exchange 2007
• Case Study: CA XOsoft and VMware
• Case Study: UTexas Disaster Recovery
• Deploying Exchange Server 2007 on VMware Infrastructure: A VMware Internal Case Study

VMworld.com:

• BC2824: Deploying Microsoft Clustering for Exchange and SQL Server in VI3
• BC3221: CA and VMware: A Case Study Examining an Exchange and SharePoint DR and HA Solution
• EA2263: Deploying Exchange 2007 on VMware Infrastructure 3
• EA3022 Deploying Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Mailbox Roles on VMware Infrastructure 3
• EA3124 Achieving 80% Virtualization in Production (with SQL & Exchange)
• EA3127 Exchange 2007 on VMware: Two Real-World Success Stories
• AP03 Virtualization of Microsoft Exchange Server
• WV18 Virtualizing Exchange 2007 – The Final Frontier?
• WV19 Exchange and SQL on ESX Server

(You’ll need an account to access the VMworld material)

Cisco / EMC / VMware:

• Microsoft Exchange 2007—End-to-End Messaging Infrastructure Solution

Yesterday I blogged about the Powershell script that Hugo Peeters created for adding a snapshot Column to your VI Client with Powershell. Hugo used a custom field to show this data and I wrote the following:

Some of you might say that this lacks the detail one would love to see within vCenter. Well knowing Hugo my guess it that this will evolve fast, and I expect some cool additions coming up.

Well I wasn’t expecting Hugo to be this quick, but he just blogged about four new additions:

Total Snapshot Size

The number of snapshots is quite interesting, but even more interesting, is the total size of the delta files all snapshots are occupying. They might be eating up all your precious SAN space. Plus, reverting to or committing a large snapshot is tricky. Add-VMSnapshotSize.ps1

Host Hardware Model

Want to see what models of hardware you are using in your datacenter? You could look at the summary tab of each host. Or run this script to add the info to the every Hosts tab in the VI Client. Select your Datacenter, select the Hosts tab and enjoy! Add-VMHostModel.ps1

Host ESX Version

Did you update all your ESX Servers to the latest version? Check it quickly using this script. Add-VMHostVersion.ps1

Host LUN Count

Last but certainly not least: are you sure every datastore you are using is available to all your ESX Servers? It is visible at a glance when you add the LUN Count to your VI Client! Add-VMHostLUNCount.ps1

So what can we expect in the future? I really don’t know… but my guess is that we can expect a lot more coming up over the next few days.

[update: if any of the links fail, here's the source article.]

One of my former colleagues pointed me out to this very cool tool: Blueproximity. In short what it does, automatically lock your screen when a bluetooth device is outside of given boundaries.

Not only can you lock your pc, but you can also unlock it or kick off any script you like. It should be possible to do the following: Lock PC, set Pidgin messenger to away, mute audio… The list is endless. Read the extensive Ubuntu how to here. Thanks Patrick for sharing.

VMware lately published a whole bunch of must read technical papers:

Storage Design Options for VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Companies planning to deploy VDI face decisions about the use of both local and shared storage,
and in the case of shared storage solutions, choosing between differing technologies available in
today’s market. Selecting the appropriate storage model is important for both performance and costs reasons. Certain solutions require less overhead than others, as do different implementations of the same technology. Costs can vary greatly depending on which storage options are chosen. Fortunately organizations can leverage a myriad of best practices to help drive these costs down, while improving performance. This paper provides information on technical concepts related to storage implementations in a VMware ® Virtual Desktop Infrastructure ( VDI) environment.

VMware View Reference Architecture Kit

This reference architecture kit is comprised of four distinct papers written by VMware and our supporting partners to serve as a guide to assist in the early phases of planning, design and deployment of VMware View based solutions. The building block approach uses common components to minimize support costs and deployment risks during the planning of VMware View based deployments.

SQL Server Workload Consolidation

Database workloads are very diverse. While most database servers are lightly loaded, larger database workloads can be resource-intensive, exhibiting high I/O rates or consuming large amounts of memory. With improvements in virtualization technology and hardware, even servers running large database workloads run well in virtual machines. Servers running Microsoft’s SQL Server, among the top database server platforms in the industry today, are no exception.

Using IP Multi Cast with VMware

IP multicast is a popular protocol implemented in many applications for simultaneously and efficiently delivering information to multiple destinations. Multicast sources send single copies of information over the network and let the network take responsibility for replicating and forwarding the information to multiple recipients.

I was just reading this excellent KB article on consolidating snapshots. It really contains a wealth of information and a procedure on how to remove a snapshot of a disk that has been changed in size for instance.

if the disk has been changed in size the following error will show up during the boot process of the VM:

The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created

Read the full article for the solution.