Version 2.9.5 (September, 2010)

• On vInfo tab new field: Guest heartbeat status. The heartbeat status is classified as:  gray – VMware Tools are not installed or not running, red – no heartbeat, guest operating system may have stopped responding. yellow -intermittent heartbeat, may be due to guest load. green – guest operating system is responding normally
• On vMemory tab new fields: Ballooned memory, consumed overhead memory, private memory, shared memory, swapped memory and static memory entitlement
• On vDatastore tab new field: Full device address (controller, target, device)
• On vInfo tab new fields: Commited storage, uncommited storage and unshared storage
• Bug fix! A semicolon in the annotations fields are no longer a problem for the export functions
• Bug fix! Health check “Zombie vmdk” problems solved
• Bug fix! Health check “inconsistent foldername” problems solved
• Bug fix! On vport tab the column “notify switch” value solved
• Bug fix! Sort problem on vNic tab on column “speed” solved

This script generates a health check report similar to that of vmwareHealthCheckScript but for the new vSphere release of VMware ESX(i) 4.x and VMware vCenter 4.x and it’s managed entities. User’s can now fully customize the report based on the categories that are of importance to their operating environment, including selecting specific set of ESX(i) hosts and/or Virtual Machines.

The script reports on the following:

• New Report is now completely modular in which categories to display via a configuration file
• New Ability to specify specific ESX/ESXi host to query
• New Ability to specify specific Virtual Mchines to query
• New vCenter HA Advanced Runtime information
• New vCenter HA Configuration (primary/secondary and node states)
• New vCenter HA Advanced Configurations
• New vCenter DRS Advanced Runtime information
• New ESX/ESXi IP/HOSTNAME of vCenter Management IP
• New ESX/ESXi Newly improved Hardware and System Health Stuats information
• New ESX/ESXi Advanced Configurations
• New ESX/ESXi NUMA information

New VM UUID,Bootime,Resource Statistics, Fault Tolerance, Thin provisioned and NPIV information

Today a new version of ESX Healthcheck has been released(0.30) after two years of silence. It has taken them a long time but it’s worth it in my opinion. Anders is looking for people that want to help out developing the script, so if you are interested leave Anders a comment on his blog.

Here’s a short list of the obvious things I usually discover during a health check:

• Snapshots
• Lack of redundancy on Service Console or VMkernel
• Inconsistent naming schemes(Port groups)
• Inconsistent configuration
• DNS configuration issues
• Missing advanced HA settings
• Faulty hardware
• Free space on VMFS volumes

Unfortunately for me vSphere will catch most of these issues.

• Snapshots
  Storage view
• Lack of redundancy on Service Console or VMkernel
  HA will not configure correctly
• Inconsistent naming schemes(Port groups)
  Host Profiles or Distributed vSwitch
• Inconsistent configuration
  Host Profiles
• DNS configuration issues
  Host Profiles (partly)
• Missing advance HA settings
  currently not addressed
• Faulty hardware
  Alarms
• Free space on VMFS volumes
  Storage view & Alarms

Thanks vSphere, you will cost me my job… Only thing left is “DNS configuration issues” and “missing advanced HA settings”.

03-24-2009 – v0.9.4
Fixes:
-There was a bug reported by Duncan Epping and others regarding hosts that were appearing in the wrong cluster with respect to the portgroup listings, this should be fixed.

Enhancements:
-Detail Hardware Health sensor readings provided by CIM
-CDP Summary (individual cdp.pl available)

The script reports on the following:

• vCenter Build/Release
• ESX/ESXi Build/Release
• Cluster(s) Name/Statistics (Hosts,CPU and MEM availabity, HA,DRS and DPM enabled)
• ESX/ESXi Hardware configuration (NICs/HBAs)
• ESX/ESXi State
• ESX/ESXi Config (WIP)
• ESX/ESXi Datastore summary
• Virtual Machines summary
• VM Storage summary
• VM Network summary
• VM w/Snapshots
• VM w/RDMs
• VM w/NPIV enabled
• VM w/connected CD-ROMs
• VM w/connected Floppys

For more details, please take a look at the sample report located at here. There’s an extensive VMTN blog article here which contains usage information. The requirements for this script is: vCenter 2.5, ESX(i) 3.5, VI-Perl Toolkit or VIMA.

Configcheck can be downloaded for free. Configcheck is a Java Application so you will need to install JRE. Installing JRE can be a bit of a pain sometimes on a server so this is one of the reasons for me that will make it hard to actively use Configcheck at customer sites. (This depends on the customers policy.) Installing the product is fairly easy though:

1. Download Java JRE.
2. Download the file configcheck.zip to a Windows machine that has Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 1.5, or higher.
3. Unzip the configcheck.zip file

That’s it, fairly easy. Now you can run “configcheck.cmd” to check the specified ESX host on security issues. Once the check is complete you can click the test results to view remediation steps. The test results will look like this:

As you can see, 37 Passed and 40 Failed. Not really surprising considering the fact that I ran this against a newly build ESX 3.5 U3 host. No modifications whatsoever. Clicking the test results didn’t work on my test servers because of the lack of an internet connection. Unfortunately it’s also not possible to export the data in this version. It’s free and Tripwire’s Enterprise edition does give you this capability, if you need export and a whole lot more check it out. You can find a data-sheet with a comparison between Configcheck and enterprise here.

Luckily Tripwire also provides the remediation steps in pdf form. For instance the remediation steps for 1.2.2 “Verify the log files to keep is equal to 10″:

Description: 
This test determines if virtual machines are configured to keep 10 log files when the recommended log rotate size of 100KB is exceeded. Virtual machines log activity in their respective vmware.log files. If growth of these log files is not limited, it is possible for virtual machines to cause a denial of service on the ESX Server by filling up the VMFS volume. There are two options for preventing virtual machines from flooding the hard disk of the host: size-based log file rotation or disabling logging for the virtual machine. This policy checks for size-based log file rotation because disabling logging altogether limits troubleshooting options.

Remediation:
To remediate failure of this policy test, configure the virtual machine to keep 10 log files when the recommended log rotate size of 100KB is exceeded. Configuring the virtual machine to keep 10 log files when the recommended log rotate size of 100KB is exceeded:

Login to the VirtualCenter or use the VI Client to connect directly to the ESX Server hosting the improperly configured virtual machine.

1. Power off the virtual machine if needed.
2. Right click the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
3. Select the Options tab.
4. Select Advanced > General, and click the Configuration Parameters button.
5. Look for a row with log.keepOld and set the value to 10.
6. If the row does not exist, then click the Add Row button.
7. In the Name field type log.keepOld.
8. In the Value field type the value to 10.
9. Click OK to close the Configuration Parameters dialog.
10. Click OK to close the Virtual Machine Properties dialog.