Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Management & Automation

Cool Tool Update: RVTools 2.9

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Rob de Veij has just released a new version of RVTools:

Version 2.9 (April 2010)

  • On vHost tab new fields: Vendor and model.
  • On vHost tab new fields: Bios version and Bios release date.
  • On vInfo tab new field: VM overall size in bytes (visible when using VI API 4.0)
  • On vSnapshot tab new fields: Snapshot filename and size in bytes (visible when using VI API 4.0)
  • New vNic tab. The vNic tab displays for each physival nic on the host the following fields: Host, datacenter, cluster name, network device, driver, speed, duplex setting, mac address, PCI and wakeon switch.
  • Layout change on vHost, vSwitch and vPort tabpages. They now all start with host name, datacenter and cluster name.
  • The commandline function ExportAll extended with an extra optional parameter. It’s now possible to specify the directory where the export files are written.

Make sure to download the latest version!

Update on Bluebear – Kodiak

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Just received an update on the Kodiak project Bluebear has been working on for a while now. For those who are not familiar with Kodiak, it is a cross platform virtualization management application. Kodiak is based on flex and had a great start. Unfortunately as time passed by it went completely silent around Kodiak and I just received the news that Bluebear, the company behind Kodiak, decided to pull the plug due to the lack of funding.

Unfortunately, bluebear has been unable to find the funding necessary to move us forward as a company. Money or not, Kodiak’s 10,000+ beta participants would seemingly indicate that we bears were on to something great. True to our word, we have opened Kodiak’s source code under the GPL in the hopes that people will continue to find utility in our creation.

Anyone may browse or check out the source code.
svn co  http://svn.bluebear.org/Kodiak
Contact bears@… if you’re interested in contribution as a developer.

If anyone is interested in helping out, please contact Bluebear!

VMware vSphere Health Check Report v4.0.0 by @lamw

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William Lam just released version 4 of his Health Check Report. I guess I can talk about it for hours but the sample report that William provides says more in just a few clicks than I can in 1000 words. Below you can find an outtake from the release notes. I clipped it as it was too long, but you can find the complete info here. Make sure this script is part of your standard toolkit as it will most definitely come in handy! Highly recommended.

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

    • Custom shares on a Resource Pool, scripted

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    We’ve spoken about Resource Pools a couple of times over the last months and specifically about shares. (The Resource Pool Priority-Pie Paradox, Resource Pools and Shares.) The common question I received was how can we solve this. The solution is simple: Custom Shares.

    However, the operational overhead associated with custom shares is something most people want to avoid. Luckily for those who have the requirement to use share based resource pools one my colleague Andrew Mitchell shared a powershell script. This powershell script defines custom shares based on a pre-defined weight and the amount of VMs / vCPUs in the resource pool. I would recommend to schedule the script to run on a weekly basis and ensure the correct amount of shares have been set to avoid running into one of the scenarios described in the articles above.

    Please keep in mind that if you use nested resource pools you will need to run a separate script for each level in the hierarchy.

    Eg. If the resource pools are setup like this the following you will need one script to set the shares for RP1, RP2 and RP3, and another script to set the shares for RP1-Child1 and RP1-Child2.

    RP1
    >>RP1-Child1
    >>RP1-Child2
    RP2
    RP3

    Download the script here. Again to emphasize it I am not the author, we would appreciate it though if you could share any modifications / enhancements to this script.