Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Management & Automation

vCenter 2.5 Update 5 released!

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VMware vCenter Server 2.5 Update 5 – includes Converter Enterprise

Latest Version: 2.5 Update 5 | 2009/07/10

The list of resolved issues is quite short this time. But a really important issue has been resolved and that’s why I recommend everyone who’s still running vCenter 2.5 to look in to this upgrade!
Support for High Consolidation in VMware HA Clusters – VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 5 includes significant performance and scalability improvements to VMware HA. Use VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 5 for environments with more than 35 virtual machines per host in an HA cluster.
For information on the ESX Server host settings required for this scalability improvement, see ESX Server host settings required for environments with up to 80 virtual machines per host in an HA Cluster (KB 1012002).
This is especially important for those with a high server consolidation rate or for instance for VDI. Make sure to read the KB article cause you will need to change several settings!

ftCLI.pl – VMware Fault Tolerance Management

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William Lam did it again. He created a script that manages FT from the command line. The script is called ftCLI.pl and here are the details:

Description: Managing VMware Fault Tolerance via the command line.

Params: The following operations are supported: create|enable|disable|stop

Requirement:
vSphere vCenter 4.0
ESX(i) 4.0
Advanced, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus or Eval licensing

Assumption: Your environment is FT capable and is configured properly

I think it speaks for itself. If you are a command line guy this is really useful! Great work William, keep it up! Just head over to the VMTN Communities for the download link and more details on how to use it.

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