Scripting

Howto: Sending html email from the service console

Duncan Epping · Jan 23, 2008 ·

*** This article is from 2008, this does not work for ESXi, look at vCheck from Alan Renouf instead ***

When writing the “Checking the diskspace on your VMFS volumes” blog I assumed that most of you knew how to send an email from the service console. I received a bunch of emails from people who were interested in how to setup the html email functionality. Well, here it is:

A while back VMGuru.com hosted a script which enabled you to send email from the service console. I just browsed their site and it’s nowhere to be found. So I hosted it on my site, mind: I changed the script so that you are able to send HTML emails. [Read more…] about Howto: Sending html email from the service console

Checking the diskspace on your VMFS volumes

Duncan Epping · Jan 21, 2008 ·

On a regular basis I noticed that people forget to monitor the free diskspace of their VMFS volumes. I created a script that can easily be scheduled with crontab and mailed with smtp_send. You can send it as an html based email if you setup MIME correctly. (For more info on how to set this up, check this blog) The script creates an html file with a table in which the necessary info is dumped, if a VMFS volume has less than 10% free space that specific line will be yellow and if it’s less than 5% than that line will be red… [Read more…] about Checking the diskspace on your VMFS volumes

VMware Consolidated Backup and deleted files

Duncan Epping · Jan 4, 2008 ·

As most of you know, when VMware Consolidated Backup dumps image level backups VCB only dumps used diskspace. Unfortunately for us VCB does this by checking at block level if it contains only zero’s or not. If it contains only zero’s the block is considered empty, but an Operating System doesn’t zero out the disk space that contained the files when a file is deleted. An Operating System only clears the pointers to these files. This is why you could have a disk with only 4GB of used space and a 6GB VCB dump. As of ESX 3.0.2 update 1 VMware reintroduced the shrink option in VMware Tools. Kind of a weird name “shrink” cause the vmdk doesn’t actually shrink, the unused space is just zeroed out.