Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

tool

Cool Tool Update: RVTools 2.8.1

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Rob de Veij has just released a new version of RVTools. The update only contains bug fixes but most definitely worth downloading again!

Version 2.8.1 (February 2010)

  • On vHost tab new field: number of running vCPUs
  • On vSphere VMs in vApp where not displayed.
  • Filter not working correct when annotations or custum fields contains null value.
  • When NTP server(s) = null the time info fields are not displayed on the vHost tabpage.
  • When datastore name or virtual machine name containts spaces the inconsistent foldername check was not working correct.
  • Tools health check now only executed for running VMs.

RVTools 2.8

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Rob de Veij just released a brand new version of RVTools. Download it while it is still hot! Please note that this application supports ESX(i) Server 3.5 and vCenter 2.5. vSphere 4 is in experimental support.

Latest Version: 2.8 | January 31, 2010
Download | Documentation

  • On vHost tab field “# VMs” now only powered on VMs are counted.
  • On vHost tab field “VMs per core” now only powered on VMs are counted.
  • On vHost tab field “vCPUs per core” now only powered on VMs are counted.
  • On vDatastore tab field “# VMs” now only calculated for VM’s which are powered on.
  • Health check “Number of running virtual CPUs per core” now only powered on VMs are counted.
  • Health check “Number of running VMs per datastore” now only powered on VMs are counted.
  • During Installation there will be an application event source created for RVTools. This to fix some security related problems.
  • Some users run into a timeout exception from the SDK Web server. The default web service timeout value is now changed to a higher value.
  • New fields on vHost tab: NTP Server(s), time zone information, Hyper Threading information (available and active), Boot time, DNS Servers, DHCP flag, Domain name and  DNS Search order
  • New Health Check: Inconsistent folder names.
  • Improved exception handling on vDisk, vSwitch and vPort tab pages.

Cool Tool Update: RVTools 2.7.3

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Rob de Veij has just updated RVTools to version 2.7.3. This excellent tool now includes the following additional features and fixes:

Version 2.7.3 (December 19, 2009)

  • Files in .snapshot directories are no longer reported as zombies.
  • CTK files are no longer reported as zombies.
  • The problems with VM files which are placed in the root directory are now solved.
  • Under some condition the filter screen terminated with an exception. This is fixed now.
  • New fields on vDisk tab: ThinProvisioned and split.
  • New field on vTools tab: Virtual machine hardware version.

Read the full releasenotes/documentation here. And make sure to get this new version, in my opinion this is one of the most valuable tools out there.

Cool Linux tool: Blueproximity

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One of my former colleagues pointed me out to this very cool tool: Blueproximity. In short what it does, automatically lock your screen when a bluetooth device is outside of given boundaries.

Not only can you lock your pc, but you can also unlock it or kick off any script you like. It should be possible to do the following: Lock PC, set Pidgin messenger to away, mute audio… The list is endless. Read the extensive Ubuntu how to here. Thanks Patrick for sharing.

Replicate Technologies Datacenter Analyzer

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About a week ago Eric Sloof wrote about Datacenter Analyzer(RDA) by a company called Replicate Technologies. I think his blog title is a great caption of the product “RDA Rocks”. It does indeed.

The one thing that really stands out is the simplicity of implementing the product, their website claims 30 minutes and that’s exactly what it took me. (Could have been faster if I had a decent testing kit) You just download the two virtual appliances and import them into your environment. One appliance(the probe) needs to be converted to a template and the other one just needs to be started up.

If you’ve got DHCP running your RDA Controller will be available via HTTP. Just type in the IP and you’re good to go. You still need to install “probe vm’s” for RDA to be able to gather and analyse all the date. The probes can be considered as tiny helper vm’s. They only consume 64MB of memory and 640MB of diskspace, and installing them is just a matter of “next, next, finish”.

Like I said, simplicity seems to be the main theme around RDA 1.0. After the probe vm’s have been installed it’s just a matter of clicking “update analysis”, or you could do this automatically on a regular interval, and after a few minutes of gathering and analyzing data you can already view the reports.

The first thing that pops up is the dashboard, which gives an overview of “possible” problems:

Next two screenshots are more detailed views of two specific sections to give you an idea what RDA is capable of:

I think that this 1.0 version looks really promising for the future. Still I would love to see more detailed information added. I just wrote down a couple of them:

  1. Time Sync, compare ESX hosts and reveal if all VM’s are syncing or not
  2. VirtualMachine memory, balooning / swapping / limits set lower than assigned memory
  3. Storage counters for free disk space etc
  4. Queues, disk and cpu
  5. ESX Service Console swapping
  6. ESX Advanced Settings set (compare with other hosts and display difference)
  7. Export findings to csv, pdf, excel etc…

Still RDA is a tool you should look into, you can download a free trial for RDA here. Just check it out.