VMotioning your Service Console?!

Some of you might have looked into VIMA already. Those of you that didn’t please check it out because I expect this to be the way that VMware is heading. Note, I don’t know if it really is the way VMware is heading, but a Service Console with VMotion capabilities sounds like a winner to me. A little birdie also just told me that APC, the UPS Company, is finishing their VIMA Compatible UPS software agent!

The cool thing about VIMA is that it includes the RCLI commands, the Perl toolkit and a logger daemon named vilogd. The last one will be the topic for this blog. So what does this logger daemon include?
The vilogd daemon collects all the logs that are available through the DiagnosticManager VI API:

• ESX/ESXi3.x service log
• VI Client Agent log
• Virtual Machine kernel core file
• System log

First add servers to the VIMA appliance:

sudo vifp addserver esx01.localdomain
sudo vifp addserver esx02.localdomain

Now you will need to enable the vilogd for the servers you added:

vilogger enable

So when you’ve enabled it you could also set the max log size(default 5MB) or for instance the amount of log rotations(default 5 rotations). So the way you do this is as follows:

vilogger updatepolicy --maxfilesize 10 --collectionperiod 5 --numrotation 10

So the maximum filesize of a log will be 10MB. When the 10MB has been reached it will rotate the log files, their will be 10 log files kept by setting “numrotation”. The log files will be collected every 5 seconds.

As you can see, it’s kinda like a syslog daemon but in my opinion a bit easier to setup. I would love to see a web interface of some sort that immediately points you out to possible problems, and with a bit of work it should also be possible to direct people to kb articles on these problems. But we will just have to wait and see what will be coming up. I honostly don’t know.