Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Blogging

vimsh, what can I do with it?

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Vimsh(and vmware-vim-cm) is probably one of the worst documented commands out there. At the same time it’s one of the most powerful commands(I know it’s a shell…) out there. You name it and “vimsh” does it. Most of you ran into the “enabling vmotion” from the Service Console problem when first starting out with scripted install. Vimsh solves this:

/usr/bin/vmware-vim-cmd “hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_set vmk0″

As you can see “vimsh” is very powerful, but most of the other command-line stuff can be handled with the “esxcfg-*” commands. Well almost, for instance we talked about enabling autostart in my previous post. According to the KB article you must edit the file “/etc/vmware/hostd/vmAutoStart.xml”. Editing this file can be dangerous, I guess this goes for most ESX configuration files. During the Dutch VMUG I had a short chat with Wil van Antwerpen, Wil told me he was busy documenting the “vimsh” “command” in a wiki. After I published the enabling autostart blog Wil emailed me that this could and should be done with “vimsh”. I fully agree with Wil:

vmware-vim-cmd /hostsvc/autostartmanager/enable_autostart true

This enables the autostart functionality without manually editing the files. But I guess you would like to check if it’s enabled or disabled:

vmware-vim-cmd /hostsvc/autostartmanager/get_defaults

The big question remains, how do I know what I can and can’t do with “vimsh”. Well that’s the main reason for this post, as I said Wil has been very busy documenting “vimsh”. Wil created VI-Toolkit.com. VI-Toolkit.com contains a section on vimsh. Besides the the info that the vimsh command provices Wil added sample code. The sample code can be very usefull, but the search function is even more useful. Searching the vimsh documentation provides you with a fast way to check if a specific configuration action can be scripted with “vimsh”. For instance a search on “vimsh role” returns the following:

* Vimsvc/auth/role add
==== vimsh vimsvc/auth/role_add ==== Usage: role_add roleName [priv0] [priv1] [priv2] [priv3] [priv4]
171 B (24 words) – 14:32, 26 December 2008
* Vimsvc/auth/role permissions
==== vimsh vimsvc/auth/role_permissions ==== Usage: role_permissions roleName
1 KB (118 words) – 22:26, 28 December 2008
* Vimsvc/auth/role remove
==== vimsh vimsvc/auth/role_remove ==== Usage: role_remove roleName [failIfUsed]
123 B (16 words) – 14:34, 26 December 2008
* Vimsvc/auth/roles
==== vimsh vimsvc/auth/roles ==== Usage: roles
7 KB (550 words) – 21:50, 28 December 2008

I guess I can sum up this blog post in just one line:”Bookmark VI-Toolkit.com and add it to your RSS reader!”. Be sure to not miss out on anything regarding “vimsh” or any of the VI Toolkits that Wil be be describing and aggregating source code for. The “vimsh” section alone is already 345 pages large and it will continue to grow even more. Keep up the great work Wil and it was nice meeting you in person!

Happy New Year

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I just wanted to wish you all a happy New Year! Let’s hope 2009 will be as great as 2008 was. I will try to produce a whole bunch of great articles again! And Yellow-Bricks will have other contributors in 2009 to bring Yellow-Bricks.com to the next level. So keep checking this site for the latest and greatest info! When the first contributor is settled I will give him a proper introduction!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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2008 was a very busy year for me and my family. I started working for VMware and we moved to a new house in June, and just around VMworld Europe my Blog really kicked off. Because of that I wasn’t able to have a decent holiday this year. I took two weeks off around Christmas just to spend some time with the kids and my wife, and we’ve decided to visit Disneyland Paris during Christmas.

As you can imagine the volume of blogs over the next two weeks will be low. I’m going to try to keep my laptop off for most of the day, well at least until the kids go to bed. If you don’t want to miss out on any of the Virtualization tech blogs or news sign up to the Planet V12n RSS Feed!

Anyway I want to wish all of you a merry Christmas and a happy new year! Let’s hope 2009 will be just as great as 2008 has been so far. Thanks for an awesome year and thanks for all the support and visiting / reading my articles!

IT Knowledge Exchange Blogger of the week!

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Jason Boche just pointed me out to the fact that I have the honor to be the blogger of the week on “IT Knowledge Exchange”:

This week’s featured blog is Yellow Bricks, by Duncan Epping. The blog focuses mainly on virtualization, especially VMware, and updates readers daily with tips, tools, and links to related articles and whitepapers. As Epping describes, “[…] Bricks are solid but flexible at the same time [be]cause you can build anything you want. Same goes for virtualization, it provides you with a firm foundation with gaining flexibility at the same time.”

In a recent entry, Epping outlines his favorite health tools for VMware PSO. You can check it out here.

Yellow Bricks is a great read for anyone interested in VMware or even virtualization in general, as it covers all areas of virtualization in a thorough, balanced way.

Thanks Jenny/IT Knowledge Exchange!

Scripts, scripts, scripts… come and get them!

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I was just pointed out to this amazing topic on the VMTN Forums by William Lam and Tuan Duong. These guys created a whole bunch of scripts and decided to share them with the rest of the world:

My colleague (Tuan Duong) and I (William Lam) have been working on a virtualization/VDI deployment project over the last six months. The result of this work is a set of scripts that assist in provisioning and managing the server and lab environment for the Residential Networking Services (ResNet) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

We took the approach of developing scripts that would be free in nature to support a variety of offerings that currently exist in the enterprise space. One such tool that we would like to share with the VMware community is our Linked Clones script that was developed at the beginning of the summer of 2008. This script functions similarly to the View Composer component in the recent release of VMware View 3 but with relatively relaxed requirements.

A description and more details of the Linked Clones script can be found at:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9020

Another script that complements the Linked Clone’s script is our custom management script “*my-vmware-cmd*” which can be found at:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9061

An example of our implementation of these scripts can be found at:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9201

We also have other scripts and resources that have been consolidated onto a webpage and would like to share it:

http://www.engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/

We hope that the community finds some of these scripts to be useful in aiding VI administrators to manage their virtual infrastructure and look forward to any feedback that is provided.

Thanks
William lamw and Tuan tlduong

Check these scripts out if you’re looking for a linked clone solution on a non View Composer environment. Their website also contains a bunch of scripts, tips and tricks. One that really stands out is the RDM script, believe me this is a must have for your toolkit:

Download: rdm.sh – 11/03/08
Compatiable with: ESX 3.5+ and ESXi

This script is used to locate all virtual machines that have an RDM mapping and provides the VMs Name, Hard Disk label shown on the VIC/VC, Datastore, LUN UUID, HBA/LUN, Compatibility Mode (Phys/Virt), DiskMode and Capacity.