by Duncan Epping
Duncan Epping · ·
Because I will be posting less in the upcoming weeks about problems I face at customer sites I will try to post some cool command-line tip or trick I discovered or picked up somewhere….
open ESX console ,via putty and type the following
vm-support -x
result: all the VMID’s also known as World ID’s,
And if you’re colleagues hardly ever clean up their snapshots:
find /vmfs/volumes -iname “*delta.vmdk”
result: every delta file gets listed, including the unregistered and/or orphaned snapshots ones!
Duncan Epping · ·
I had some spare time on my hands so I decided to add some useful stuff to the VM Reporting powershell script that was posted on this blog. This is what I ended up with, there’s still room for improvement like snapshot information and scsi controller info…
Get-VIServer -Server 192.168.1.1 -User admin -Password admin$Report = @()
get-vm | % {
$vm = Get-View $_.ID
$ReportRow = "" | Select-Object VMName, Hostname, OS, IPAddress, VMState, TotalCPU, TotalMemory, MemoryUsage, TotalNics, ToolsStatus, ToolsVersion, MemoryLimit, MemoryReservation
$ReportRow.VMName = $vm.Name
$ReportRow.HostName = $vm.guest.hostname
$ReportRow.OS = $vm.guest.guestFullName
$ReportRow.IPAddress = $vm.guest.ipAddress
$ReportRow.VMState = $vm.summary.runtime.powerState
$ReportRow.TotalCPU = $vm.summary.config.numcpu
$ReportRow.TotalMemory = $vm.summary.config.memorysizemb
$ReportRow.MemoryUsage = $vm.summary.quickStats.guestMemoryUsage
$ReportRow.TotalNics = $vm.summary.config.numEthernetCards
$ReportRow.ToolsStatus = $vm.guest.toolsstatus
$ReportRow.ToolsVersion = $vm.config.tools.toolsversion
$ReportRow.MemoryLimit = $vm.resourceconfig.memoryallocation.limit
$ReportRow.MemoryReservation = $vm.resourceconfig.memoryallocation.reservation
$Report += $ReportRow
}
$Report | Export-CSV c:\export.csv
Duncan Epping · ·
A while back I wrote a scripted install aka “cfg” file, and I just noticed I never published it. Check it out, it might be useful in one way or another. It also available for download here!
Especially changing the amount of active nics in a team can be useful(I’ve commented this out again, as of ESX 3.5 U3 this isn’t necessary anymore. Enabling vmotion via the vimsh command is still valid. [Read more…] about Scripted install
Duncan Epping · ·
The common mis perception of the term “snapshot”, related to VMware, can cause huge problems. I’ve spend a lot of time the last years solving snapshot problems. For once and for all, a snapshot isn’t a static situation like a clone is. A snapshot can best be compared to a redo log, although technically it isn’t because it’s just a bitmap of disk sectors that changed. When you create a snapshot you only create a small “differences” file (*.delta.vmdk) which will contain all the differences until you delete or revert. Please remember reverting(go to) doesn’t delete the differences file! And this file can grow very fast depending on how many changes are made on the disk.
Another thing that people don’t know is the way “delete all” works, but I’ve already outlined that a while ago in a blog.
When you’ve got for instance a 10 levels deep nested snapshot tree with a very large last snapshot it would almost be impossible to press delete all because it will take up a lot of disk space. It would consume a lot of time doing a “delete” for every snapshot, and still it would always take up additional diskspace.
Another way to remove the snapshot is just by cloning the VM to another Datastore. This way you don’t need the extra disk space on the same datastore, and it might be a good moment to consider re-loadbalancing your lun’s again. [Read more…] about Deleting snapshots when everything else failse…
Duncan Epping · ·
Via the Dutch VMUG site I landed on a new blog, well new… for me new. This blog is maintained by Toni Verbeiren and he created an excellent article about monitoring performance stats for the scsi controllers inside a VM:
A tool is available on ESX 3.5 that creates histograms by default (and complete traces if wanted) is VscsiStats. As an option, one provides the vSCSI handle ID and the VM World ID. In order to get some statistics at all, one first needs to start the monitoring:
./vscsiStats -sAfter some time, the relevant statistics can be fetched by issuing a command like:
./vscsiStats -i 8260 -w 1438 -p ioLength
There also appears to be a pdf about the subject on the VMware website which contains good information on the subject.
EDIT: You can find the command here: /usr/lib/vmware/bin