Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Tools

Minor Update: RVTools 2.3.1

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Rob de Veij just released a minor update for RVTools, 2.3.1. Rob was notified by several users that an error occured while using RVTools. Here is the relevant section from the release notes:

Bug on vDatastore tab fixed: System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type ‘VimApi.NasDatastoreInfo’ to type ‘VimApi.VmfsDatastoreInfo’.

If you are running RVTools, be sure to pick up the latest version here.

UPS(APC) initiated shutdown of ESXi

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I’ve been waiting for APC to create a VIMA ready package of their PowerChute Network Shutdown software for a while now. It’s supposed to be released soon but I haven’t heard a release date yet.

For everyone that can’t wait VMTN User “jholland” created this PDF “How to configure ESXi to shutdown using an APC SmartUPS“. It’s a great creative solution that shuts down your vm’s and host when a power failure occurs keep in mind you need a UPS with network management capabilities. In short:

  1. add a script to your ESXi box and enable ssh with public key authentication
  2. add a debian VM
  3. install APC UPS daemon
  4. edit the APC UPS daemon config file which calls the script(1.) via ssh/public key

I guess the APC solution will work in a similar way by the way, but the APC solution will be full supported and this solution clearly isn’t cause you would need to alter ESXi. (The APC solution will use the RCLI/Perl toolkit probably)

I can imagine you would want to use it anyway. Thanks to jholland for creating this PDF, it’s his first post I hope there’s more to come! (By the way, it isn’t that difficult to apply this information on VIMA. I might test it out this week and update you guys)

Cool Tool Update: RVTools 2.3

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RVTools is getting more and more the attention and appreciation it deserves. This also means that more and more people are emailing Rob with all kinds of feature requests. Version 2.3 contains a couple bug fixes and a couple of cool new additions:

  • New vHost tab. The “vHost” tab displays for each host the name, datacenter name, cluster name, CPU model, CPU speed, number of CPU’s, CPU usage %, total amount of memory, memory usage %, memory reserved for the service console, number of NIC’s, number of HBA’s, number of VM’s running on this host and the ESX version of this host.
  • All tab pages (except the datastore tab) now also display the datacenter name and cluster name.
  • New VMFS “Block size”, “Max Blocks”, “Number of extents”, “Major Version number”, “Version string” and “VMFS upgradeable” fields on the vStorage tab.
  • New “Virtual machine version string” field on the vInfo tab page.
  • Divide by zero bug on vDatastore tab is now fixed.
  • The vInfo fields “upgrade policy” and “Sync.time with host” which where introduced in version 2.2 caused some problems in combination with the 2.0 version of the VI API. This is now fixed!

Now head over to Rob’s website and download the new version. Don’t forget to give Rob feedback!

Replicate Datacenter Analyzer 1.2

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I was just testing Replicate Datacenter Analyzer(RDA) 1.2 at a customer site. Well “testing” might not be the correct word in this case. RDA 1.2 discovered several things which are impossible to discover manually when you’ve got 5+ hosts. In this case there were over 50 hosts and RDA exposed the following:

  • inconsistent portgroup names
  • inconsistent portgroup provisioning on hosts
  • multiple VM’s with diskfiles on more than one datastore
  • multiple VMr’s with more than one connected NIC

RDA can do a lot more of course, so I suggest you head over to their website and download the demo and see if your VI3 environment is healthy or not. For those that already tested the previous release, 1.2 offers the following new capabilities:

New IP Knowledge Module – including the ability to detect and resolve configuration issues across a broader range of network issues. RDA can now identify routing and subnet misconfiguration and can determine if a guest VM network stack is operating correctly, as well as check for duplicate IP address usage in a common subnet.

Expanded drill down diagnostics – providing data to explain issues and guide IT towards a quick resolution – going beyond the basic identification of errors to save IT time and money.

Advanced item level notification – offering email notifications which now include full details on the exact changes that RDA has detected. The detailed notifications provide IT administrators with the latest information, delivered directly to their inbox.

Broader platform support – including support for VMware ESXi.

Increased scalability – offering significant performance improvements, including enhanced support for large scale datacenters of 100+ hosts.

FastSCP vs WinSCP

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The last couple of days I’ve read a whole bunch of tweets and blogs on Veeam’s FastSCP. Everyone highly praises FastSCP because it is really really fast compared to WinSCP. I’ve been testing it myself in the past and indeed it is. With the release of 3.0 Beta that probably hasn’t changed a bit.

Keep in mind though that FastSCP is faster than WinSCP because FastSCP doesn’t encrypt the data that is being copied. WinSCP does encrypt the data and I consider WinSCP to be more secure than FastSCP. FastSCP does use an SSH control channel though. An SSH control channel can best be described as a secure channel which is used to pass user/password/port information. In addition to the ports used for SSH other ports need to be opened up for FastSCP to work, which increases the attack surface of the ESX host. Some of you might have security policies in place, this might be the time to start reading it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m telling you not to use FastSCP cause it’s a wonderful tool, but it might not be what you are looking for. If you do require an encrypted file transfer WinSCP would be the way to go. WinSCP even gives you the option to pick between the different encryption types. In other words, think before you use…