Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Management & Automation

Replicate Technologies Datacenter Analyzer

· ·

About a week ago Eric Sloof wrote about Datacenter Analyzer(RDA) by a company called Replicate Technologies. I think his blog title is a great caption of the product “RDA Rocks”. It does indeed.

The one thing that really stands out is the simplicity of implementing the product, their website claims 30 minutes and that’s exactly what it took me. (Could have been faster if I had a decent testing kit) You just download the two virtual appliances and import them into your environment. One appliance(the probe) needs to be converted to a template and the other one just needs to be started up.

If you’ve got DHCP running your RDA Controller will be available via HTTP. Just type in the IP and you’re good to go. You still need to install “probe vm’s” for RDA to be able to gather and analyse all the date. The probes can be considered as tiny helper vm’s. They only consume 64MB of memory and 640MB of diskspace, and installing them is just a matter of “next, next, finish”.

Like I said, simplicity seems to be the main theme around RDA 1.0. After the probe vm’s have been installed it’s just a matter of clicking “update analysis”, or you could do this automatically on a regular interval, and after a few minutes of gathering and analyzing data you can already view the reports.

The first thing that pops up is the dashboard, which gives an overview of “possible” problems:

Next two screenshots are more detailed views of two specific sections to give you an idea what RDA is capable of:

I think that this 1.0 version looks really promising for the future. Still I would love to see more detailed information added. I just wrote down a couple of them:

  1. Time Sync, compare ESX hosts and reveal if all VM’s are syncing or not
  2. VirtualMachine memory, balooning / swapping / limits set lower than assigned memory
  3. Storage counters for free disk space etc
  4. Queues, disk and cpu
  5. ESX Service Console swapping
  6. ESX Advanced Settings set (compare with other hosts and display difference)
  7. Export findings to csv, pdf, excel etc…

Still RDA is a tool you should look into, you can download a free trial for RDA here. Just check it out.

HAL check?!

· ·

My post about reverting your HAL triggered Alanrenouf to create a short, but very cool script that compares the amount of cpu’s to the windows HAL you’ve chosen. This way you will know within a second if you need to change the HAL of any of your vm’s! Cool stuff:

connect-viserver MYVISERVER
$myCol = @()
ForEach ($VM in (Get-VM))
{
$MyDetails = “” | select-Object Name, HAL, NumvCPU
$MYDetails.Name = $VM.Name
$Hal = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $VM.Name -Query “SELECT * FROM Win32_PnPEntity where ClassGuid = ‘{4D36E966-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}'” | Select Name
$MYDetails.HAL = $Hal.Name
$MYDetails.NumvCPU = $VM.NumCPU
$myCol += $MYDetails
}
$myCol

revert your HAL!

· ·

A couple of weeks ago I did a design review. During this review we discussed the process of reverting your “HAL”, on a Microsoft machine, from multi cpu to single cpu. The customer just emailed me a script that can automate this for you. After some googling I noticed that Mike Laverick already wrote an article on this well over two years ago, which also contains this script. (more or less the same) Still I would like to share this with you guys:

@echo off

:DRIVER_HAL_UPDATE
SET HAL=

IF %NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS%==1 (
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Multiprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=ACPIAPIC_UP
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Multiprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=MPS_UP
) ELSE (
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Uniprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=ACPIAPIC_MP
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Uniprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=MPS_MP
)

IF NOT “%HAL%”==”” (
ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Installing %HAL% HAL
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.

devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 := !E_ISA_UP !ACPIPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_MP !MPS_UP !MPS_MP !SGI_MPS_MP !SYSPRO_MP !SGI_MPS_MP
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 := !E_ISA_UP !ACPIPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_MP !MPS_UP !MPS_MP !SGI_MPS_MP !SYSPRO_MP !SGI_MPS_MP
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 := +%HAL%
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 := +%HAL%
devcon.exe update %windir%\inf\hal.inf %HAL%
devcon.exe ReScan

ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Rebooting
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.
devcon.exe Reboot
) ELSE (
ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Correct HAL Detected
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.
)
GOTO :EOF

There’s a topic on VMTN about this, read it. You need the Microsoft DevCon util, which is part of the support tools, for more info on devcon click here. Mike Laverick’s paper can be found here. Thanks for pointing this out Xing.

Cool Tool Update: RVTools 2.1

· ·

I wrote about RVTools 2.0 a month ago and suggested a couple of additions. Rob picked these suggestions by me and a couple of my readers up and started implementing them in his tool. Here’s the release notes for this new version:

Version 2.1 (November 2008)

  • Overall performance improvements.
  • New vInfo tab. The “vInfo” tab displays for each virtual machine the hostname of the guest, power state, power on date / time, number of cpu’s, amount of memory, number of nics, configuration path, annotation, ESX host name, operating system name and VI SDK object id.
  • New CPU tab. The “vCpu” tab displays for each virtual machine number of cpu’s, max cpu, overall cpu usage, shares, reservations, limits, annotations, ESX host name and operating system name.
  • New Memory tab. The “vMemory” tab displays for each virtual machine the memory size, max memory usage, memory overhead, guest memory, host memory, shares, reservations , limits, annotations, ESX host name and operating system name
  • New snapshot tab. The “vSnapshot” tab displays for each snapshot the name, description, date / time of the snapshot, quiesced value, state value, annotations, ESX host name and operating system name.
  • The header text is automatically included after a copy and past action. This version 1.1 functionality was “lost” in version 2.0.

I don’t know about you guys but for just one guy writing this FREE tool this is pretty impressive. Pick it up and be sure to have it in your VI Toolkit!

Enable VMware tools timesync

· ·

Today I visited a customer that wanted to enable the VMware tools timesync during an automated install of a Windows VM. The customer didn’t want to use powershell / perl or anyother SDK enabled tool. So what’s left?

“C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VMwareService.exe” –cmd “vmx.set_option synctime 0 1”

So this command ticks the checkbox for timesync via VMware Tools, which can come in handy when doing RIS alike installs.