Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Management & Automation

vGhetto Script Repository

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I regularly check William Lam’s section on the VMTN communities. William is definitely one of the most active contributors in terms of perl / vMA scripting. William wrote the famous ghettoVCB script which basically enables you to do full image level backups of your VMs. But that’s not the only script William wrote. He’s also written scripts for creating screenshots of VMs, resizing your vMA disks, hotplugging memory and CPUs, suspending VMs and a whole lot more. Definitely worth the bookmark: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9852

Alan Renouf’s, the powershell guru, Daily Report

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Alan Renouf is definitely on of the most active bloggers when we are talking about Powershell/PowerCLI. His posts are always educational and of a high quality. I love the one-liners but nothing, absolutely nothing, beats this awesome Daily Report script that Alan has just published. I’m not going to repost his full article because I think all of you should visit Alan’s website and give him feedback on the script so he can improve it.

There is a configurable section at the start of the script where you can set how many days old you would like your snapshots to be allowed in your infrastructure, anything over this will show in the report, it will even resolve the name ( the machine running the script must be part of an Active Directory Domain) so that you can forward this email on to them and ask them if they still need the snapshot.

The outcome of the script also contains:

  • Datastores that have less than x% free space
  • VMs which have been created in the last x days and who created these
  • VMs which have been deleted and who deleted them
  • Any Virtual Center Events which have been logged during the given timeframe
  • Any VM’s which have no VMtools installed
  • The state of all VMware services on the vCenter server
  • Any Windows events from the Virtual center server which are related to VMware
  • Any VMs which have CD-Rom or Floppy Drive’s connected
  • Any hosts in Maintenance Mode
  • Any Hosts in a disconnected state

Schedule it and email it to your helpdesk on a daily base and let them check the outcome and archive it. It might come in handy sometime when you need to troubleshoot your environment, believe me it will… Thanks Alan, keep it up.

NetApp’s vSphere best practices and EMC’s SRM in a can

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This week both NetApp and EMC released updated versions of documents I highly recommend to everyone interested in virtualization! Now some might think why would I want to read a NetApp document when we are an EMC shop.! Or why would I want to read an EMC document when my environment is hosted on a NetApp FAS3050. The answer is simple, although both documents contain vendor specific information there’s more to be learned from these documents because the focus is VMware products. No marketing nonsense, just the good stuff!

NetApp’s guide dives in to the basics of multipathing for instance. Especially the section on iSCSI/NFS is useful, how do I setup multiple VMkernels for load balancing and are the pros and cons. EMC’s SRM and Celerra guide includes a full how to set this up. Not only the EMC side but also the VMware SRM side of it. Like I said both documents are highly recommended!

ESXi and the update manager part II

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A couple of days ago I posted about Update Manager wanting to install updates regarding the Nexus while I did not have the Nexus installed. I’ve rebuild my entire test environment with the latest(GA) build and noticed that I’m not experiencing these issues anymore. Now I’ve either had an outdated version of VUM, a screwed up database or I was sleeping when I wanted to apply the patches. Normally I take screenshots when things like this happen but because I did not have much time I did not take them.

I reinstalled my test environment again this morning and again I’m not able to reproduce it. The patch only installs when the Cisco Nexus 1000v is installed. It seems like my observation was wrong, I do however think it’s a smart thing not trust on technology for 100%, check your baseline before you apply it.