Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Management & Automation

Orphaned vmdk’s

· ·

While doing a “mini-healthcheck” at a customer site I noticed a specific Datastore with less than 2% of free diskspace. After a bit of research an orphaned VMDK was found. Orphaned vmdk’s are virtual hard-disks that are not connected to a VM. Probably because they were removed from the inventory without deleting the files.

You can easily find these orphaned vmdk’s via the Service Console:

find -iname “*-flat.vmdk” -mtime +7

For those that don’t like using the Service Console you can also check this with Powershell Ad van Bokhoven created a nice script which he describes as follows:

This script asks the virtual center what the disk are of each VM and puts this into an array. After this, it reads all files on all datastores. If the file is a vmdk file, it will check wheter this file is in the array. If it’s not, you’ve found a orphaned vmd.

I would advise to regularly check your environment on orphaned disks, it can save precious diskspace.

Cool Tool Update: RVTools 2.2

· ·

I’ve wrote about this tool several times so most of you must have tested it by now and are probably actively using it: RVTools. Rob just notified me that he uploaded a brand new version of his tool. The following have been added to version 2.2:

  • New vDatastore tab. The “vDatastore” tab displays for each datastore the name, connectivity status, file system type, number of virtual machines on the datastore, total capacity in MB’s, free capacity in MB’s, multiple host access indication and the url.
  • Your custom defined fields are now visible on most of the tab-pages
  • New menu option “export data to csv file”
  • New “upgrade policy” field on vTools tab-page
  • New “Sync time with host” field on vTools tab-page
  • The field “OS” which is displayed on most of the tab-pages now displays the name of the guest OS according to the VMware Tools. In previous versions we used the configuration value. The vTools tab displays both “OS” fields.

Here’s a screenshot of the new tab “vDatastore”:

If you’ve never used RVTools before besure to check it out, it’s worth it. And if you are already using it download it and upgrade!

Compare specific ESX configuration items

· ·

Hugo posted a great script. It will compare configuration items between a given set of hosts. This can especially come in handy when you’ve got a huge amount of datastores, portgroups or a huge amount of ESX hosts for that matter. Hugo’s post contains a set of excellent examples. Just check his post for more details and the script, heres what the outcome would look like for now:

InputObject                         SideIndicator
———–                                ————-
esxServer1_Local               <=
esxServer2_Local               =>
DATASTORE_TEST1            =>

Update: Hugo just posted a follow up to his original blog. This new script creates a CSV file, which can be imported in to Excel for example and the result will look like this:

New version of the Powershell Healthcheck script released

· ·

Ivo Beerens just published a new version of his Powershell Healthcheck script. The script will report the following in a nicely formatted html file:

  • VMware ESX server Hardware and version
  • VMware vCenter version
  • Cluster information
  • VMware statistics
  • Active Snapshots
  • CDROMs connected to VMs
  • Floppy drives connected to VMs
  • Datastores Information such as free space
  • RDM information
  • VM information such as VMware tools version,  processor and memory limits
  • VM’s and there datastore
  • VMware timesync enabled
  • Percentage disk space used inside the VM
  • VC error logs last 5 days

Go to Ivo’s website for the download of the script and the source blog post. I use this script personally just to keep track of changes and get a quick overview of the current situation of an environment.

Old School: Label your Hardware

· ·

So you were used to labelling your hardware with the name of the System running on it. But when running everything virtual you can label your ESX hosts but never know which VM resides at which Server without checking your console and/or vCenter.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you would have a magic Label that updated itself every once in a while. This way one would be able so see within just a glance which VM runs on which host.As you know there’s no such thing as a magic “label”, or maybe there is…

Yesterday I received an email from Nick Weaver(@lynxbat). He emailed me about a very very very cool script he wrote. No this script isn’t going to update your printed label off course. This script displays the VM’s running on your host on the front panel LCD. Most servers these days have frontpanel LCD’s and they can be updated with a couple simple ipmi commands.

Nick wrote an extensive article on how-to create a self updating magic label 🙂 in short:

  1. Install Dell OpenManage and run it on the ESX host (needed for ipmi drivers)
  2. Install ipmitool 1.8.10(SCP over, ./configure, make, make install….)
  3. Run lcd_update.sh script

Now walk over to your Dell server and check the result in the display, isn’t that amazing. Probably one of the most inventive scripts I’ve seen the last few months, it’s simple and gets the job done. Great job Nick, and I’m really curious what you will come up with next.

If I can find a Dell Machine this week I will definitely test it and post a screenshot!
I just received a link to a youtube video that shows it’s actually working!