Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

ESX

Update on Bluebear – Kodiak

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Just received an update on the Kodiak project Bluebear has been working on for a while now. For those who are not familiar with Kodiak, it is a cross platform virtualization management application. Kodiak is based on flex and had a great start. Unfortunately as time passed by it went completely silent around Kodiak and I just received the news that Bluebear, the company behind Kodiak, decided to pull the plug due to the lack of funding.

Unfortunately, bluebear has been unable to find the funding necessary to move us forward as a company. Money or not, Kodiak’s 10,000+ beta participants would seemingly indicate that we bears were on to something great. True to our word, we have opened Kodiak’s source code under the GPL in the hopes that people will continue to find utility in our creation.

Anyone may browse or check out the source code.
svn co  http://svn.bluebear.org/Kodiak
Contact bears@… if you’re interested in contribution as a developer.

If anyone is interested in helping out, please contact Bluebear!

vSphere Security Hardening Guide

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A couple of months ago I blogged about the draft version of the vSphere Security Hardening Guide. Yesterday VMware published the first official version. Keep in mind that any feedback is still highly appreciated and the document is still subject to change.

source article

This document is the official release of the vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide. This version is based on feedback collected during the public draft comment period. We will still be collecting feedback on this document — if there are any typos, errors, or changes, please add them to the comments below.

Overall, there are more than 100 guidelines, with the following major sections:

  • Introduction
  • Virtual Machines
  • Host (both ESXi and ESX)
  • vNetwork
  • vCenter
  • Console OS (for ESX only)

vSphere Hardening Guide April 2010.pdf (951.0 K) View Download

vSphere Resource Kit

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Almost a year ago one of my colleagues told me about a project he was working on called the “vSphere Resource Kit“. I guess it reminds many of you of the Resource Kits that were released for the Microsoft products. I guess the idea is quite similar.

On twitter several people asked who the authors were and many said they were “unknown” within the virtualization community. I beg to differ as I know at least two of the authors and without knowing it most of you are familiar with them as well!

Chris McCain and Rawlinson Rivera. I can hear all of you think, who the hell are these guys… Well think for a second about the book Scott Lowe wrote. Many don’t appear to know this but Scott’s book was originally written by Chris McCain and Rawlinson Rivera! Chris(lead-author) and Rawlinson wrote the VI3 version of the book which Scott converted into a vSphere book. (Hey there is a reason the cover art is exactly the same.) Don’t get me wrong here, I just want to make it clear that these guys are no newcomers! Besides that, Rawlinson is a VMware employee and a well respected one I must say.

The question of course is what can we expect? Chris McCain, Rawlinson Rivera, Rodney McIntosh, Brian Cleary and “John” are currently writing 8(!) Books and recording over 150 videos.  I have listed the titles of the book below and I can’t even imagine the amount of work that will go into this:

  1. Installing and configuring VMware vSphere 4
  2. Configuring and managing VMware vSphere 4 Storage and Network resources
  3. Creating and managing VMware vSphere 4 Virtual Machines
  4. Managing, Monitoring and optimizing VMware vSphere 4 resources
  5. Planning and implementing VMware vSphere 4 Availability
  6. Scripting with VMware vSphere 4
  7. Planning and implementing VMware vSphere 4 Site Recovery Manager 4
  8. Planning and implementing desktop virtualization with VMware VIEW 4

To be honest, I can’t wait to get my hands on a draft copy of the resource kit to review it and asked Rawlinson if he could provide a status update as according to their website the original release date was set somewhere Q2 – 2010. This has been postponed with two months to a more “marketable” date: end of August. VMworld!

vpxuser description disappearing?

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One of my former colleagues(who wants to remain anonymous) notified me about this. Although many of you might not even be doing this, for just the few who are it is useful to know this caveat.

For security reasons some customers have the requirement to insert specific account information for every user. It appears that when you modify the details for “vpxuser” in /etc/passwd and the vpxuser password is refreshed these account details are overwritten. (Every 30 days the vpxuser password gets refreshed.) According to my former colleague this has been fixed in vCenter 4.0 but the “issue” does exist in vCenter 2.5 Update 6 today.

Generating load?

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Every once in a while you would want to stress a VM or multiple VMs to test the working of for instance VMware DRS. There are multiple tools available but most of them only focus on CPU and are usually not multithreaded. My colleague Andres Mitchell developed a cool tool which will load a multithreaded CPU load and will generate memory load.

Andrew tweeted about this tool this week and I tested it today. It looks great and it works great.

Saw some tweets wanting ways to generate load in a VM. Here’s one I prepared earlier: http://bit.ly/9A39Xh (multithreaded CPU and mem load). I exchanged a couple of emails with Andrew after this tweet and asked him to write a short explanation of what the tool does:

It’s a pretty simple utility to generate CPU and/or memory load within a virtual machine (or a physical server if you are still living in the dark ages). You can specify the number of threads to generate for CPU load and the approximate load each thread generates. You can also specify how much memory you want the application to consume. There’s a timer so you can configure it to only generate the specified load for a set period of time, and system memory utilisation and system/per core CPU utilisation indicators within the application.

Here’s a screenshot of the app: