Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Management & Automation

Cool Tool Update: RVTools 3.0

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When I was enjoying some family time yesterday Eric Sloof stole my usual RVTools scoop. Nevertheless I believe it is worth publishing this as RVTools is one of the most valuable free non-vendor tools out there. Rob de Veij released a major version of RVTools. There are couple of major improvements in this version and hence the reason it took Rob slightly longer than expected to come with this update.

Here are the improvements in RVTools 3.0:

  • Pass-through authentication implemented. Allows you to use your logged on Windows credentials to automatically logon.
  • All numeric columns are now formated to make it more readable.
  • On vInfo the columns Commited, Uncommited, Shared and on vSnapshot the column size are now formated in MBs instead of bytes.
  • New tabpage created with service console and VMKernel information.
  • Now using vSphere Web Services SDK 4.1 which supports the new features available in vSphere 4.1
  • Export to csv file now uses Windows regional separator
  • Using NPOI to make it possible to write directly to xls files without the need for a installed Excel version on the system.
  • New menu function to write all information to one excel workbook with for each tabpage a new worksheet.
  • New command line options. Check the documentation!

Download it now,

RVTools updated to 2.9.5

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This tool doesn’t need an introduction anymore. One of the most valuable free tools I know… RVTools. Rob found some spare time again and managed to update RVTools. It includes some bug fixes and new fields. Just download it and try it out, I am certain it will dig up something that you did not know about! Keep it up Rob,

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

Need a coffee break? (VIX APIs WebEx!)

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This would be a good way to spent your time:

Title: VIX APIs – Managing and Automating Guest OS
We will show examples of how the VIX API can be used to develop tools for managing guest environments in VMware products. Included will be a demonstration of proof-of-concept tools that monitor processes and transfer files to multiple guests simultaneously. We will also show a Perl script that combines vSphere Web Services SDK and VIX SDK to re-size a virtual disk and then the filesystem above it on the fly.

Wednesday June 30th, 9:00 AM PST
Speaker: Matt Lamantia R&D Manager
Level: Advanced
Participant Passcode: 783534
Toll Free: 1-888-450-4823
Toll: 1-719-785-5674
WebEx Information:
Meeting Number: 923 019 604
https://vmware.webex.com/vmware/j.php?ED=146358697&UID=0&RT=MiM0

For those in EMEA it is at 18:00 (GMT+2)

Scripts for “Proactive DRS/DPM”

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I never noticed this set of scripts to be honest but Anne Holler(VMware Employee) posted these about a year ago. What the scripts do is change various DRS/DPM settings to pro-actively manage your environment and change DRS and DPM behaviour based on expected workload.

Proactive DRS:

  • setDRSAggressive.pl
    The script setDRSAggressive.pl sets various DRS operating parameters so that it will recommend rebalancing VMotions even when current VM demand does not make those moves appear worthwhile. As an example use case, if powerOnHosts.pl (see “Proactive DPM” posting) is used to trigger host power-ons at 8am before an expected steep increase in VM demand weekdays at 9am, setDRSAggressive.pl can also be scheduled to run at 8am to force rebalancing moves to the powered-on hosts.
  • setDRSDefault.pl
    The script setDRSDefault.pl resets DRS’ operating parameters so that it resumes its normal behaviour.  (Behaviour before using setDRSAggressive.pl)
  • setMaxMovesPerHost.pl
    The script setMaxMovesPerHost.pl can be used to increase DRS’ limit on the number of VMotions it will recommend in each (default every 5 minutes) regular DRS invocation

Proactive DPM:

  • powerOnHosts.pl
    The script powerOnHosts.pl changes cluster settings to engender
    recommendations to power on all standby hosts and then to disable DPM so that those hosts are kept on while demand remains low.
  • enableDPM.pl
    The script enableDPM.pl re-enables DPM to run in its normal reactive behavior. As an example use case, this script can be scheduled to run each weekday morning at (say) 10am (after full VM demand load is expected to be established) or at (say) 5pm (after full VM demand load is likely to diminish) to resume normal DPM operation.

I had multiple customers asking me if it was possible to schedule a change of the DRS and DPM configuration. My answer used to be yes you can script it but never managed to find a script until I bumped into these coincidentally today.

vCenter Orchestrator Blog (vCO Team)

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Two of my colleagues just launched a new website. It is probably one of the few vCenter Orchestrator Blogs out there and definitely worth following.

Christophe & I (Burke) have launched a new website at http://www.vcoteam.info that we hope to use to help educate and encourage the adoption of Orchestrator for VMware automation tasks.

One of the first articles explains how to create a self provisioning portal with vCO in a detailed stepwise approach.

I am certain many more cool articles will follow. Bookmark it or add vCOTeam.info to your RSS reader.