Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

healthcheck

RVTools updated to 2.9.5

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This tool doesn’t need an introduction anymore. One of the most valuable free tools I know… RVTools. Rob found some spare time again and managed to update RVTools. It includes some bug fixes and new fields. Just download it and try it out, I am certain it will dig up something that you did not know about! Keep it up Rob,

Version 2.9.5 (September, 2010)

  • On vInfo tab new field: Guest heartbeat status. The heartbeat status is classified as:  gray – VMware Tools are not installed or not running, red – no heartbeat, guest operating system may have stopped responding. yellow -intermittent heartbeat, may be due to guest load. green – guest operating system is responding normally
  • On vMemory tab new fields: Ballooned memory, consumed overhead memory, private memory, shared memory, swapped memory and static memory entitlement
  • On vDatastore tab new field: Full device address (controller, target, device)
  • On vInfo tab new fields: Commited storage, uncommited storage and unshared storage
  • Bug fix! A semicolon in the annotations fields are no longer a problem for the export functions
  • Bug fix! Health check “Zombie vmdk” problems solved
  • Bug fix! Health check “inconsistent foldername” problems solved
  • Bug fix! On vport tab the column “notify switch” value solved
  • Bug fix! Sort problem on vNic tab on column “speed” solved

VMware vSphere Health Check Report v4.0.0 by @lamw

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William Lam just released version 4 of his Health Check Report. I guess I can talk about it for hours but the sample report that William provides says more in just a few clicks than I can in 1000 words. Below you can find an outtake from the release notes. I clipped it as it was too long, but you can find the complete info here. Make sure this script is part of your standard toolkit as it will most definitely come in handy! Highly recommended.

This script generates a health check report similar to that of vmwareHealthCheckScript but for the new vSphere release of VMware ESX(i) 4.x and VMware vCenter 4.x and it’s managed entities. User’s can now fully customize the report based on the categories that are of importance to their operating environment, including selecting specific set of ESX(i) hosts and/or Virtual Machines.

The script reports on the following:

  • New Report is now completely modular in which categories to display via a configuration file
  • New Ability to specify specific ESX/ESXi host to query
  • New Ability to specify specific Virtual Mchines to query
  • New vCenter HA Advanced Runtime information
  • New vCenter HA Configuration (primary/secondary and node states)
  • New vCenter HA Advanced Configurations
  • New vCenter DRS Advanced Runtime information
  • New ESX/ESXi IP/HOSTNAME of vCenter Management IP
  • New ESX/ESXi Newly improved Hardware and System Health Stuats information
  • New ESX/ESXi Advanced Configurations
  • New ESX/ESXi NUMA information
  • New VM UUID,Bootime,Resource Statistics, Fault Tolerance, Thin provisioned and NPIV information

    • New version of ESX Healthcheck script

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    Long before people ever heard about the VI Toolkit the ESX Healthcheck ruled the earth. The ESX Healthcheck script used the esxcfg-* commands in the Service Console and dumped all the info into a html file.

    Today a new version of ESX Healthcheck has been released(0.30) after two years of silence. It has taken them a long time but it’s worth it in my opinion. Anders is looking for people that want to help out developing the script, so if you are interested leave Anders a comment on his blog.

    Thanks vSphere, you will cost me my job!

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    As some of you know I did a health check in Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks ago. A health check is a relatively short engagement. A couple of days on-site and a day off-site for a report. When vSphere went GA I started thinking about all the things I discovered during this particular health check. Now some might say that the things I discovered were low hanging fruit. The truth is that during health checks the things discovered are usually low hanging fruit. Usually it is not because the Sys Admins don’t have enough knowledge, but because they either don’t get any time to manage their environment properly or they’ve been doing it for so long they don’t see the obvious anymore… Don’t get me wrong, there is more to a health check than just the obvious stuff, but I merely want to point out the improvements vSphere brought us in terms of consistent installation / configuration and alarms / actions.

    Here’s a short list of the obvious things I usually discover during a health check:

    • Snapshots
    • Lack of redundancy on Service Console or VMkernel
    • Inconsistent naming schemes(Port groups)
    • Inconsistent configuration
    • DNS configuration issues
    • Missing advanced HA settings
    • Faulty hardware
    • Free space on VMFS volumes

    Unfortunately for me vSphere will catch most of these issues.

    • Snapshots
      Storage view
    • Lack of redundancy on Service Console or VMkernel
      HA will not configure correctly
    • Inconsistent naming schemes(Port groups)
      Host Profiles or Distributed vSwitch
    • Inconsistent configuration
      Host Profiles
    • DNS configuration issues
      Host Profiles (partly)
    • Missing advance HA settings
      currently not addressed
    • Faulty hardware
      Alarms
    • Free space on VMFS volumes
      Storage view & Alarms

    Thanks vSphere, you will cost me my job… Only thing left is “DNS configuration issues” and “missing advanced HA settings”.

    Update: VMware Health Check Report 0.94

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    William Lam posted an update of his Health Check script on the VMTN Communities. I’ve been using this script extensively at several customer sites together with VIMA. Here are the release notes:

    03-24-2009 – v0.9.4
    Fixes:
    -There was a bug reported by Duncan Epping and others regarding hosts that were appearing in the wrong cluster with respect to the portgroup listings, this should be fixed.

    Enhancements:
    -Detail Hardware Health sensor readings provided by CIM
    -CDP Summary (individual cdp.pl available)