Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

RVTools 2.5.5!

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Just released, a brand new version of RVTools:

Latest Version: 2.5.5 | June 27, 2009
Download | Documentation

Release notes:
Version 2.5.5 (June 27, 2009)
Changed health check properties are not set at start of the program. The program will use the default values until you start and transmit the properties screen. This problem is now fixed.

Since version 2.5 the vDisk tab displays information that is aggregated from “config.hardware” and “guest” information. That was not a good idea! If there is more than one partition on a virtual disk the displayed information is wrong. To solve this problem I now split this information in a vDisk tab which will show only the information that is provided by the “config.hardware” information and a new vPartition tab that will display the “guest” information.
Better exception handling on filter.

New fields on vHost tab: Number of CPUs, Cores per CPU and virtual CPUs per Core.

For those who are using this awesome tool, there’s a donate button and of course there are other ways to  give Rob some credits :-). Visit Robware.net

PowerCLI: Upgrading vHardware to vSphere Part 1: Templates

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One of the blogs I’ve always enjoyed reading is ICT-Freak.nl. ICT-Freak is maintained by Arne Fokkema. Unfortunately Arne used to mix Dutch and English posts which means his blog is not aggregated on Planet V12n. This is why I wanted to point you out to the following awesome article:

With the release of vSphere VMware introduced a new hardware level for VM’s. De upgrade process to the new hardware level is already described on Scott Lowe’s blog: http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/06/01/vsphere-virtual-machine-upgrade-process/.

I wanted to see if I could script this process with PowerCLI. My first goal was to upgrade al my templates.

The script does the following:

  • Export template names to CSV
  • Convert templates back to VM’s
  • Check the vHardware version of the VM. If the hardware version is version 4 start the VM
  • When the VM is ready check the VMware Tools version. If the VMware Tools are old, the script will install the new version.
  • When the VMware Tools are Ok the VM gets a shutdown.
  • When the VM is down, the vHardware will be upgraded
  • The final step is converting the VM back to a template.

I stripped out the link to his script, please visit the source article and download the script over there.

Open source VI(vSphere) Java API 2.0 GA!

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For all the developers out there, I just received the following from my colleague Steve Jin:

VI (VSphere) Java API 2.0 was GAed last night. The 2.0 release represents 6 months of continuous (after work) engineering effort since this January. It has packed many features:

New high performance web service engine. When I told people that we replaced AXIS, most of them wanted me to confirm what I said. The new engine is 15X faster in loading, 4+X in de-serialization than AXIS 1.4 with only 1/4 of size.

  • vSphere 4 support.
  • REST client API.
  • Caching framework API.
  • Multiple version support with single set of APIs.
  • Clean licenses. The API and dependent dom4j are all BSD licenses.

The open source project was sponsored by VMware but not supported by VMware. To download it, visit http://vijava.sf.net

load balancing active/active SANs part II

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About a year ago I wrote about a script that would load balance your Active/Active SAN by evenly dividing LUNs on all available paths. A week ago I provided Kees van Vloten with this script so that it could be incorporated into a scripted install solution. Kees has enhanced the script and emailed it so that I could share it with you guys:


for N_PATHS in 2 4 6 8; do
# These are the LUNs with N_PATHS:
LUN_LIST=`esxcfg-mpath -l | egrep "^Disk.+has $N_PATHS paths" | awk '{print $2}'`
N=1
for LUN in $LUN_LIST; do
echo "LUN: $LUN, Counter: $N, Possible paths:"
esxcfg-mpath -q --lun=$LUN | grep "FC" | awk '{print $4}'
# Take the Nth path for this LUN
LUN_NEWPATH=`esxcfg-mpath -q --lun=$LUN | \
grep "FC" | awk '{print $4}' | head -n $N | tail -n 1`
# Make the Nth path the preferred path
esxcfg-mpath --lun=$LUN --path=$LUN_NEWPATH --preferred
echo ""
# Increase N (within the limit)
N=$(($N+1))
if [ $N -gt $N_PATHS ]; then
N=1
fi
done
done

Thanks for sharing,

VMware Studio 2.0

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There’s a brand new version of VMware Studio coming up. For those who aren’t familiar with VMware Studio it basically comes down to this: with VMware Studio you can create your own virtual appliances.

Or as VMware puts it:

VMware Studio provides mechanisms for authoring, on-site management, distributing and deployment of production-ready virtual appliances. ISVs, hardware appliance vendors, and developers use VMware Studio to configure and package their solutions in a standards-based Open Virtualization Format (OVF). VMware Studio also enables software providers and developers to leverage the industry’s leading virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure, and offers built appliances all the great management services that VMware Infrastructure delivers.

New features:

  • Windows Support (32 bit and 64 bit) 2003 & 2008 Server
  • Create multi-VM vApp and multi-VM VA
  • 64 bit support for SLES 10.2, RHEL 5.2 & 5.3, CentOS 5.2 & 5.3
  • Extensible in-guest Management Framework
  • OVF 1.0 support
  • Eclipse Plugin
  • Enable ESX, ESXi, VC, Server 2.0 and Workstation as provisioning engine
  • Automatic Dependency Resolution (Static)
  • Publish OVF to VC
  • Infrastructure enhancements – GUI and Builds
  • Studio-created VM as Input

VMware Studio 2.0 will be available on Monday! Better make sure to get it while it’s hot… even vStu is excited!

There’s more info to be found here.