Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Management & Automation

Site Recovery Manager, random thoughts

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I’ve been disconnected from the internet the last couple of days because of a UPC screw up. So I missed out on all the SRM blogging. I am just reading all the new blogs that were created over the last couple of days. Here are just a couple random thoughts…

  • The SRM docs talk about a “proteced” and a “recovery” site. Does this mean that SRM always needs an “active/passive” setup. In other words, can I only use 1 SAN for production.
    Why? Well I could imagine that one would benefit from having some sort of load balancing with 2 VirtualDatacenters and 2 active SAN’s. Not only will the uptime increase, because if a site fails only half will failover, but also performance will be less of an issue having half of your active vm’s running on another SAN and cluster. And I’m not even gonna talk about TCO when half of your environment is doing nothing.
  • What about the VirtualCenter licensing? Do I need 2 VirtualCenter Licenses?
  • What about failing back? I played around with a beta and there’s no automated option for a fail back at this moment, when will it be available?
  • What about a third site? Think about switching datacenters every week or so for the insurance / banking industry. (Think Anti-Terrorism.)

VMware tools version?

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A couple of weeks ago I contacted Rob, the man behind RVTools, and asked him if he could add an export or copy+past functionality to his amazing tool “RVTools”. This amazing tool checks the VMware tools version and gives you the option to update them all at once. Rob updated his tool today:

Version 1.1
Changes: May 10, 2008
You can copy the selected datagrid values with ctrl-c to the clipboard. The header text is automatically included. After this you can paste the clipboard data to your favorite editor.
The login form remembers the names and/or IP addresses of the entered ESX hosts and/or VirtualCenter servers.
You can use a filter to display only the “templates” or “virtual machines”.
Annotations “notes” field is visible in the datagrid.
http://rvtools.deveij.com

Especially the copy and paste option is handy for those who do consultancy like me, thanks Rob for adding this feature and for this excellent tool! Nextup converting it into a VirtualCenter plugin?!? 😉

Show VMware Tools version with BGInfo

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Arne blogged about a cool feature of BGInfo yesterday, but his post is in dutch so it’s not on the Planet V12 RSS feed which is  a shame cause it’s definitely usefull info.

In short: BGInfo is a handy little SysInternals tool which sets a desktop wallpaper with pre-defined info like total memory, disk info, ip info etc. With BGInfo it’s also possible to define a specific field with for instance the version information of a file. Arne discovered that it’s possible to point towards the VMware tools executable and display the VMware tools version on your server desktop aka wallpaper.

I guess a picture says more than words:

Powershell VI Toolkit

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Today I combined a couple of Powershell scripts which as a result gives a nice html formatted file with a table. This table contains all VM’s with their VMware Tools status and version. I’ve uploaded the script here. The outcome looks like the following:

As you can see, the VMware tools status is “ok” but the versions are totally out of line. I know there are already a few tools handling this but as far as I know none of them creates a text/html output file.

Tool: Checking the status of VMware Tools and updating

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Rob de Veij created a cool tool for checking the status of VMware Tools and easily upgrading to the latest version of the tools by just selecting the appropriate VM.

RVTools is a small .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display the version of the installed VMware tools.It also shows if the tools are upgradeable. The button “Upgrade VMware Tools” starts an UpgradeTools_Task for every selected VM.


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