Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Tools

mbrscan, mbralign and RCU

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A while back I wrote an article on checking your disk alignment and even changing the disk alignment from the service console. Since then a lot of people asked me for the exact link, because I don’t have a now.NetApp.com account I wasn’t able to provide it. Today I received an email from the developer, Eric Forgette, with a link to a community article which contains links to both tools, mbralign and mbrscan.

Eric is also the one who developed RCU(Rapid Cloning Utilities). I just watched the demo video on youtube. In short: It’s a vCenter pluging which enables you to deploy hundreds of VDI desktops by utilizing the capabilities of the array. Keith Aasen wrote a blog article on this plugin which has some more details. I guess with the vStorage API coming up we can expect more vendors to add storage capabilities to the vCenter GUI, think snapshots / clones and more…

Minor Update: RVTools 2.4.1

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Rob de Veij just uploaded a minor update of RVTools, version 2.4.1. Make sure you download it and replace the 2.4 version I blogged about just three days ago.

The new filter throws an exception when there are ESX hosts which do not belong to any cluster. With the help from Mario Vinet this problem is now solved! Thanks again Mario.

Cool tool update: RVTools 2.4

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Another update again by Rob de Veij, RVTools 2.4. This release includes a new feature, filtering. Rob also revealed that the upcoming version will contain health checks. Here are the changes:

Version 2.4 (March 2009)

  • On the vDatastore tab you can now see which hosts are connected to the datastore.
  • The data on the vInfo, vCpu, vMemory, vDisk, vFloppy, vCD, vSnapshot and vTools tab pages can now be filtered.

Now head over to Rob’s website and download the new version!

vmktree 0.3.0 out of beta!

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If we look at the VMTN community today there are a whole lot of people sharing powershell scripts, perl and even .net programs. Back in the days of ESX 2.x there wasn’t such a huge community, but there was one tool that everyone knew about and probably everyone tested and used at one point, vmktree!

Lars Trøen is man behind vmktree and he just released 0.3.0. For those of you who don’t know what vmktree is:

vmktree is a free web tool that shows you the graphs of resource usage of VMware ESX Server, VMware Server (on Linux), GSX Server (on Linux) and a few other data center devices (ilo/ilo2/rsa2/ds4000).

On VMware Server (and GSX) and ESX 3.x vmktree provides it’s own agent that collects system statistics and does not depend on vmkusage like it does on ESX 2.x. On ESX 3.x there is no agent installed on the ESX server itself as all values are polled from the machine vmktree is installed on.

vmktree is compatible with ESX and ESXi and needs to be installed outside of the Service Console, in contrary to previous versions. Lars created a great howto, which includes a CentOS jeos VM. I hope Lars can find some extra time and get that live esxtop back in again!

JeOS with Suse Studio!

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I’ve been looking into creating JeOS VM’s. JeOS stands for “Just enough Operating System“. In short: a purpose build OS that only contains the bare minimum that one needs to run.

In a virtual world, where footprint matters, it can be really beneficial to use JeOS vm’s. Although JeOS sounds great one of the problems used to be creating JeOS vm’s. Of course you can download a Debian Netinstall CD and just pick the packages you think you need, but it’s a lot of work. Ubuntu also released a JeOS version of their Server OS but it’s targetted at ISV’s and not for your average sysadmin as the “howto” clearly shows. [Read more…] about JeOS with Suse Studio!