Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Management & Automation

Veeam Management Pack for VMware 4.0

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Veeam just announced 4.0 of the “Management Pack for VMware”, also known as NWorks:

Version 4.0 includes comprehensive end-to-end monitoring from ESX Cluster, to ESX Host, to Virtual Machine and to Applications inside the VM. The nworks/Veeam MP now provides integration of application and service data with the VI3 topology. This breakthrough functionality enables a fully integrated picture, with end-to-end monitoring from ESX Servers through to the enterprise applications, such as SQL Server, Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange running inside virtual machines.

Version 4.0 also includes new features such as CIM SMASH hardware sensor status and alerts, graphical representations of data stores, flexible collection intervals, VirtualCenter 2.5 performance counters, and more!

The cool thing about this solution is that is doesn’t rquire agents on ESX or any kind of helper for that matter. Veeam “Management Pack for VMware” relies on the VMware API/SDK, which assures that 4.0 is also fully supported for ESXi. The management pack is an add-on for your current SCOM or HP Ops for that matter.

Replicate Technologies and RDA 1.1

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Just received an email that RDA has been updated. Version 1.1 has just been released and the following changes have been incorporated:

  • Easy wizard based setup – get up and running even faster!
  • Larger scale support – RDA now supports much larger deployments.
  • Highly detailed diagnostic analysis, helping you find and fix problems more quickly.
  • Full support for ESXi

I’m downloading RDA 1.1 right now and will try to right a follow up of my original article “Replicate Technologies Datacenter Analyzer” as soon as I can find some spare time.

What’s in a name…

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This will probably take me a couple of weeks and maybe months to get fully adjusted to the new names VMware is going to use for their products.

Most of the name changes were already announced during VMworld. And there are three major ones in the actual list:

  1. VirtualCenter → VMware vCenter
  2. VDI → VMware View
  3. VMFS → VMware vStorage VMFS

So most related products also had a revamp, Lifecycle Manager became VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager and so on. Makes sense to me with the Virtual Datacenter OS coming up.

So learn this list by heart and we will do a test tomorrow 😉

Installing VMware tools without a reboot?

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I’ve been getting a lot of questions on this script that makes it possible to install VMware tools without rebooting. I must admit that it’s a really smart way to surpress the automatic reboot. But please keep in mind that it’s not VMware Tools that needs the reboot but the actual OS that needs the reboot. Why? VMware tools includes device drivers! The “tools” itself is a service that can easily be restarted but that’s clearly not something you would do with a device driver. And don’t forget about what happens to your nic driver when it’s being updated… yes, all network connection will drop.

So I do think this script can be usefull if you want to do a manual reboot at a certain time. But please be sure reboot the VM as soon as possible, cause not rebooting the VM can and probably will cause problems.

Adding a role to a user from the Service Console

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Three weeks ago I blogged about a powershell script that can assign roles to users. This is very handy when doing scripted installs cause it seemed that it was impossible to add a role to a user from the Service Console. Today we had a discussion via email and my colleague from South Africa, Hugo, actually found out how to add a role to a certain user from the Service Console:

vmware-vim-cmd vimsvc/auth/entity_permission_add vim.Folder:ha-folder-root 'newuser' false ReadOnly true

The command used is “vmware-vim-cmd” aka “vimsh”. “vim.Folder:ha-folder-root” is on cluster level, ‘newuser’ is the username of the user you want to add the role to and the role is “ReadOnly”. False and true are values for “isgroup” and “propagate”.

Great job Hugo, and thanks for letting me know about this solution.