Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcenter

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.

Permissions and roles

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I was just troubleshooting a problem with permissions and roles at a customer site within vCenter. For some weird reason we could not create a VM. I hardly ever use this functionality and if I do it’s mostly on a “Hosts & Clusters” level.

This customer wanted to set permissions on a “HA-DRS” Cluster level. Each cluster will be administered by a different group of admins. These admins should not be allowed to do any administrative tasks on one of the other clusters in vCenter. Half of the setup worked, as in the admins could do certain tasks on the ESX hosts, but there was no way they could create VM’s.

I’ve browsed through my documentation but couldn’t find anything useful but luckily VI:OPS contained an excellent document on this topic: VI3 Roles and Permissions.

I did a copy and paste of the information that clarified the problem we were facing:

VMs appear in the inventory in two places: under the “Virtual Machines and Templates” view and the “Hosts and Clusters” view. This is also reflected in their privilege inheritance: VMs inherit privileges from both the containing host/cluster object as well as the containing VM/Template folder. Under Hosts and Clusters, possible containing objects include: folders, clusters, hosts, and resource pools. The two views and hierarchies become unified at the top level datacenter (or any folder that contains the datacenter)

Certain tasks require privileges on both sides of the hierarchy. For example, to create a VM, you need to have the “VM > Inventory > Create” privilege on a VM folder (in the VM view) as well as “Resource > Assign VM to Resource Pool” somewhere on an object in the Host view (folder, cluster, host, or resource pool). If you have a role which contains both these privileges, and you assign it at the datacenter level, it will propogate down both sides of the hierarchy. If, however, you want to limit its scope, then you’d need to apply it separately to individual subsections on each side of the hierarchy.

In other words, creating VM’s requires permissions on both levels “Datacenter” and “Cluster”.

Add Custom Fields to VI Client with Powershell Part 2!

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Yesterday I blogged about the Powershell script that Hugo Peeters created for adding a snapshot Column to your VI Client with Powershell. Hugo used a custom field to show this data and I wrote the following:

Some of you might say that this lacks the detail one would love to see within vCenter. Well knowing Hugo my guess it that this will evolve fast, and I expect some cool additions coming up.

Well I wasn’t expecting Hugo to be this quick, but he just blogged about four new additions:

Total Snapshot Size

The number of snapshots is quite interesting, but even more interesting, is the total size of the delta files all snapshots are occupying. They might be eating up all your precious SAN space. Plus, reverting to or committing a large snapshot is tricky. Add-VMSnapshotSize.ps1

Host Hardware Model

Want to see what models of hardware you are using in your datacenter? You could look at the summary tab of each host. Or run this script to add the info to the every Hosts tab in the VI Client. Select your Datacenter, select the Hosts tab and enjoy! Add-VMHostModel.ps1

Host ESX Version

Did you update all your ESX Servers to the latest version? Check it quickly using this script. Add-VMHostVersion.ps1

Host LUN Count

Last but certainly not least: are you sure every datastore you are using is available to all your ESX Servers? It is visible at a glance when you add the LUN Count to your VI Client! Add-VMHostLUNCount.ps1

So what can we expect in the future? I really don’t know… but my guess is that we can expect a lot more coming up over the next few days.

[update: if any of the links fail, here’s the source article.]

What’s in a name…

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This will probably take me a couple of weeks and maybe months to get fully adjusted to the new names VMware is going to use for their products.

Most of the name changes were already announced during VMworld. And there are three major ones in the actual list:

  1. VirtualCenter → VMware vCenter
  2. VDI → VMware View
  3. VMFS → VMware vStorage VMFS

So most related products also had a revamp, Lifecycle Manager became VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager and so on. Makes sense to me with the Virtual Datacenter OS coming up.

So learn this list by heart and we will do a test tomorrow 😉