Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

vCenter 2.5 U4 performance plugin install script

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I just received an email from my colleague Massimiliano Daneri. He wrote a script that automates the installation of the new performance reporting plugin.

Richard Garsthagen already wrote an article including screenshots about the plugin by the way, take a look here: http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=276

Check the following KB articles for more info on the installation of the plugin  and after reading you will probably agree that using the script is a lot easier:
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008330
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008296

Download the script here! All credits go to Massimiliano Daneri!

Massimiliano is also the creator of the plugin “PXE Manager For vCenter Server”. The plugin enables PXE boot for ESX(i) and has been previewed at VMworld Europe. Unfortunately it’s not available yet for public download.

Powershell and importing .CSV files

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I’ve been playing around with powershell yesterday. We needed to create over 100 VM’s and there’s no point in doing that all by hand. The customer provided us with a .csv file that contained specific info on these VM’s. It took me a while to figure out how to read the info.csv file and how to actually use it. But as always it’s actually fairly simple and that’s why I decided to write it down:

Before we even start, the CSV should be formatted as follows:

vmname,cluster
VM001,HA-DRS-Yellow-Bricks

Read the complete csv file into a variable:

$csv_info = Import-Csv c:\scripts\info.csv

For every line in the csv variable do something:

foreach ($line in $csv_info) {
write-host " This is virtual machine $($line.vmname) on cluster $($line.cluster)"
}

This line would print something like this:

This is virtual machine VM001 on cluster HA-DRS-Yellow-Bricks

As you noticed in the example above we used $line.vmname to get the name of the VM printed and $line.cluster for the cluster name, cool huh! BTW, Alan’s quick reference guide really helped me out!

XenServer Enterprise for free?

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Before anyone starts shouting, yes I’m a VMware employee and a VMware fanatic or whatever they call it these days.

One of my customers phoned me up today and wanted to discuss the fact that XenServer Enterprise is available for free. I wasn’t prepared at all which makes a discussion like this very “interesting” to say the least, especially because I’m not a competitive expert.

I answered the customers question by asking a question: Do you really think the product is free and enterprise ready?

The customer referred me to this blog article by Mr. Crosby, the article clearly states:”…will find in XenServer a complete free Enterprise Virtual Infrastructure solution”.

This particular customer is a heavy DRS user, I’m talking about multiple clusters with each at least 3 resource pools which contains at least 100 VM’s each. The current version of XenServer doesn’t have the DRS implementation the customer currently uses, but not only doesn’t the current version have this feature… the next version will also not have this feature. DRS will be part of Xenserver Essentials, in other words the paid management tool.

I’m just a consultant, I might be wrong… but most of my customers consider DRS to be an Enterprise feature. But it’s actually not only DRS that’s missing from the Free “Enterprise” Virtual Infrastructure solution… what about High Availability? I could be wrong again but all my customers seem to agree that High Availability is an Enterprise feature. Again HA is available, but it has been shifted from XenServer Enterprise to XenServer Essentials, yes the paid version… and what about support on the Free version, can’t seem to find any info on support.

Now I’m not going to tell you guys that VMware has the best product or that XenServer doesn’t cut it in an enterprise environment because that depends on your needs and wants. I do want to stress that not everything is what it seems to be and don’t believe everything you read.

vmktree 0.3.0 out of beta!

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If we look at the VMTN community today there are a whole lot of people sharing powershell scripts, perl and even .net programs. Back in the days of ESX 2.x there wasn’t such a huge community, but there was one tool that everyone knew about and probably everyone tested and used at one point, vmktree!

Lars Trøen is man behind vmktree and he just released 0.3.0. For those of you who don’t know what vmktree is:

vmktree is a free web tool that shows you the graphs of resource usage of VMware ESX Server, VMware Server (on Linux), GSX Server (on Linux) and a few other data center devices (ilo/ilo2/rsa2/ds4000).

On VMware Server (and GSX) and ESX 3.x vmktree provides it’s own agent that collects system statistics and does not depend on vmkusage like it does on ESX 2.x. On ESX 3.x there is no agent installed on the ESX server itself as all values are polled from the machine vmktree is installed on.

vmktree is compatible with ESX and ESXi and needs to be installed outside of the Service Console, in contrary to previous versions. Lars created a great howto, which includes a CentOS jeos VM. I hope Lars can find some extra time and get that live esxtop back in again!

Increasing the queue depth?

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One of the most promising blogs of this moment is definitely Frank Denneman‘s blog. Frank is a freelance consultant with a focus on virtualization and storage. His latest addition “Increasing the queue depth” is an excellent article and really shows that Frank knows what he’s talking about!

When it comes to IO performance in the virtual infrastructure one of the most recommended “tweaks” is changing the Queue Depth (QD). But most forget that the QD parameter is just a small part of the IO path.

The IO path is made up of layers of hardware and software components, many of which can have a huge impact on the IO performance. The best results are achieved when the whole system is analysed and not just the ESX host alone.

I’m not going to copy and paste his entire article of course. Head over to his website and start reading. I can also recommend these articles: SRM and HP Continous Access DR Group Design and HP CA and the use of lun load balancing scripts. Don’t forget to bookmark the site or add it to your rss reader!