Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Tools

Installing VMware tools without a reboot?

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I’ve been getting a lot of questions on this script that makes it possible to install VMware tools without rebooting. I must admit that it’s a really smart way to surpress the automatic reboot. But please keep in mind that it’s not VMware Tools that needs the reboot but the actual OS that needs the reboot. Why? VMware tools includes device drivers! The “tools” itself is a service that can easily be restarted but that’s clearly not something you would do with a device driver. And don’t forget about what happens to your nic driver when it’s being updated… yes, all network connection will drop.

So I do think this script can be usefull if you want to do a manual reboot at a certain time. But please be sure reboot the VM as soon as possible, cause not rebooting the VM can and probably will cause problems.

Update: Symantec and VMotion, Supported or not?

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There has been a lot of hassle on this one over the last couple of days. Symantec wasn’t supporting VMotion for their anti-virus suite. (Mike D., Lone SysAdmin, VInternals)A little birdie just told me that the article has been updated:

Is VMware VMotion ESX server supported with Symantec AntiVirus and Symantec Endpoint Protection?

Symptoms:
Symantec supports running Symantec AntiVirus, Symantec Endpoint Protection, and Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager in VMware environments.

A few customers have reported problems with Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager with VMware VMotion ESX server. These problems may or may not be related to the presence of VMware VMotion or the presence of the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager.

Some the problems include:

  • Client communication problems
  • Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager communication problems
  • Content update failures
  • Policy update failures
  • Client data does not appear in the database
  • Replication failures


Solution:
Symantec is investigating each support case and will update Symantec products where necessary. If you experience a problem that you suspect is related to VMware VMotion, please contact Symantec Technical Support.

So in short, there have been problems which might or might not have been related to VMotion or Symantec EPM. Symantec will support products running in a VMware Environment!

revert your HAL!

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A couple of weeks ago I did a design review. During this review we discussed the process of reverting your “HAL”, on a Microsoft machine, from multi cpu to single cpu. The customer just emailed me a script that can automate this for you. After some googling I noticed that Mike Laverick already wrote an article on this well over two years ago, which also contains this script. (more or less the same) Still I would like to share this with you guys:

@echo off

:DRIVER_HAL_UPDATE
SET HAL=

IF %NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS%==1 (
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Multiprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=ACPIAPIC_UP
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Multiprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=MPS_UP
) ELSE (
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Uniprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=ACPIAPIC_MP
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Uniprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=MPS_MP
)

IF NOT “%HAL%”==”” (
ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Installing %HAL% HAL
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.

devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 := !E_ISA_UP !ACPIPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_MP !MPS_UP !MPS_MP !SGI_MPS_MP !SYSPRO_MP !SGI_MPS_MP
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 := !E_ISA_UP !ACPIPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_MP !MPS_UP !MPS_MP !SGI_MPS_MP !SYSPRO_MP !SGI_MPS_MP
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 := +%HAL%
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 := +%HAL%
devcon.exe update %windir%\inf\hal.inf %HAL%
devcon.exe ReScan

ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Rebooting
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.
devcon.exe Reboot
) ELSE (
ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Correct HAL Detected
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.
)
GOTO :EOF

There’s a topic on VMTN about this, read it. You need the Microsoft DevCon util, which is part of the support tools, for more info on devcon click here. Mike Laverick’s paper can be found here. Thanks for pointing this out Xing.

Cool Tool Update: RVTools 2.1

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I wrote about RVTools 2.0 a month ago and suggested a couple of additions. Rob picked these suggestions by me and a couple of my readers up and started implementing them in his tool. Here’s the release notes for this new version:

Version 2.1 (November 2008)

  • Overall performance improvements.
  • New vInfo tab. The “vInfo” tab displays for each virtual machine the hostname of the guest, power state, power on date / time, number of cpu’s, amount of memory, number of nics, configuration path, annotation, ESX host name, operating system name and VI SDK object id.
  • New CPU tab. The “vCpu” tab displays for each virtual machine number of cpu’s, max cpu, overall cpu usage, shares, reservations, limits, annotations, ESX host name and operating system name.
  • New Memory tab. The “vMemory” tab displays for each virtual machine the memory size, max memory usage, memory overhead, guest memory, host memory, shares, reservations , limits, annotations, ESX host name and operating system name
  • New snapshot tab. The “vSnapshot” tab displays for each snapshot the name, description, date / time of the snapshot, quiesced value, state value, annotations, ESX host name and operating system name.
  • The header text is automatically included after a copy and past action. This version 1.1 functionality was “lost” in version 2.0.

I don’t know about you guys but for just one guy writing this FREE tool this is pretty impressive. Pick it up and be sure to have it in your VI Toolkit!

VM Template best practices (Linux)

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I was just reading up on my Google Reader. A lot of information been dropped over the last couple of days and more and more people are getting active on the VMware blogoshere. One of the articles that really caught my attention was the “VM Template best practices (Linux)” by Leo Raikhman.

Leo did a great job in explaining how to build up a decent Template. Leo even included a way to regularly zero out the Linux Filesystem for the purpose of VCB image level dumps with small footprints.

And although Leo’s article talks about Linux only this also applies for Windows. If you will be doing VCB then remember to zero-out your filesystem every once in a while. Linux doesn’t scrub the sectors where the files resided and neither does Windows. I wrote an article on how to do this from within Windows. Yes you can do it by hand via the “shrink disk” option in VMware Tools, but as Leo already pointed out there’s no way of scheduling that one, as far I have discovered.

So most of the stuff written about in Leo’s article applies to Windows, yeah also the partition alignment! DO IT! But the zero-out procedure won’t work, I’ve wrote one a while back and here it is:

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Dim fso, d, dc
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set dc = fso.Drives
WshShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\", 0, "REG_SZ"
WshShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\SDelete\", 0, "REG_SZ"
WshShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\SDelete\EulaAccepted", 1, "REG_DWORD"
For Each d in dc
If d.DriveType = 2 Then
Return = WshShell.Run("defrag " & d & " -f", 1, TRUE)'
Return = WshShell.Run("sdelete -c " & d, 1, TRUE)
End If
Next
Set WshShell = Nothing

Be sure to download Sdelete before you start, and remember that this script also does a defrag. If you are running “thin” disks than doing a defrag might not be the smartest thing to do, if so just delete the following line from the vb script:

Return = WshShell.Run("defrag " & d & " -f", 1, TRUE)'