Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware

Using the vSphere Syslog Collector and want to change rotation/sizing?

· ·

Yesterday I received a nice tip from @Shaun_Gee. During the installation of the vSphere Syslog Collector you have to select the max size of the log files and when a rotation will happen. But how do you change this after the installation? The answer is straight forward, but unfortunately not well documented, thanks Shaun for sharing.

The vSphere Syslog Collector settings can be found under:

  • Windows 2003 –> C:\Users\All Users\VMware\VMware Syslog Collector\vmconfig-syslog.xml
  • Windows 2008 –> C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Syslog Collector\vmconfig-syslog.xml

If you open this file you can change all the settings you configured during the installation.

<defaultValues>
<port>514</port>
<protocol>TCP,UDP</protocol>
<maxSize>2</maxSize>
<rotate>8</rotate>
<sslPort>1514</sslPort>
</defaultValues>

You never know when you might need it 🙂

Using the vCenter Appliance for the Web Client?

· ·

Today on twitter there was a discussion around having an appliance for the vSphere Web Client. I didn’t get the question as there’s already a vCenter Appliance out there. Apparently not everyone realised that the Web Client is part of the vCenter Appliance. On top of that you could even split out the components and use the vCenter Appliance just for Web Client functionality. I remembered seeing an article from one of my colleagues not too long ago. I dug up the links and here they are. I included a short snippet so you know what to expect. These articles are by Michael Webster so all credits go to him:

Deploy vSphere Web Client without Additional Windows Server License

Prior to running through the steps below you should have downloaded and deployed the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance (VCVA) from the VMware web site. This process assumes you already have the VCVA connected to the network and configured with the correct timezone already. To de-register the local embedded vCenter System and to register an existing vCenter Server with the vSphere Web Client do the following….

This is the first step you can take to get the vSphere Web Client up and running. But what if you want to provide some additional redundancy. Or what if you have dozens of people literally using the Web Client and want to add some load balancing? Well Michael thought about that as well and came up with a cool solution for this.

Increase vSphere Web Client Availability and Scalability for Enterprise Environments

In the above design I’ve chosen to use the vCenter Virtual Appliance with the vCenter Services disabled to act as the vSphere Web Client Servers. I’ve used a F5 BIG-IP LTM VE to provide load balancing for the vSphere Web Client User access to the vSphere Web Client Servers, as well as for the vCenter Servers to access the vSphere License Plug-in. You can use any load balancer that will successfully load balance HTTPS traffic on port 9443, which is the port the vSphere Web Client uses.

I think this is a cool solution, and considering the Web Client is the way forward it is definitely an option exploring. I do want to point out that this has more than likely not been explicitly tested by VMware and I am uncertain if it is supported. I have reached out to our vCenter experts however to comment on it.

ESXi commandline work….

· ·

I am just playing around in my lab and needed to do a couple of common ESXi commandline tasks which I figured I would document as they will come in handy at some point.

  • List all VMs registered to this host (This reveals the Vmid needed for other commands)
    vim-cmd /vmsvc/getallvms
  • Unregister a VM
    vim-cmd /vmsvc/unregister <Vmid>
  • Register a VM
    vim-cmd /solo/register /path/to/file.vmx
  • Get power state of a VM
    vim-cmd /vmsvc/power.getstate <Vimid>
  • Power off a VM
    vim-cmd /vmsvc/power.off <Vmid>
  • Power on a VM
    vim-cmd /vmsvc/power.on <Vmid>

Repeated characters when typing in your VMs remote console?

· ·

Today I was working on a couple of test scenarios in a remote lab. For some reason the latency was a lot higher than normal and I was very difficult to type anything in the Remote Console through the vCenter Client. Every single character I tried popped up 2 or 3 times… which makes it very difficult to type a password as you can imagine. I knew I read a KB article about this exact problem a long time ago. Considering it is KB 196 I probably wasn’t the first to bump in to this. The solution is fairly simple:

  • Power off the VM
  • Edit Settings
  • Click the Options Tab
  • Click “General”
  • Click “Configuration Parameters”
  • Click “Add Row”
  • Enter the name: keyboard.typematicMinDelay
  • Enter the value: 2000000

Although the KB article doesn’t mention it, this also applies to vSphere 5.0.

Investigating the options to bring back VMTN Subscriptions!

· ·

** Read this update, VMTN type of program brought to you by the VMUG org **

Mike Laverick started a campaign last week on the VMware Community Forums and asked for the VMTN Subscription to be reinstated, coincidentally the same request came in through the VMUG board. For those who have never heard of the VMTN Subscription program it was similar to MSDN and enabled you to run VMware software in your lab environment for a fixed yearly fee. Ever since the program was cancelled every now and then people asked for it to be reinstated. This time it is different, it is not a few people who are backing the request but so far the community thread has over 10 pages worth of comments and there are literally multiple new blog posts about this topic every day.

During the weekend I dropped my management an email about this campaign and all the traction it had within the community. Literally within minutes I had a reply. I am happy to be able to confirm that we are investigating the option to reinstate the VMTN Subscription program. Keep in mind that starting a program like this does take time and the program will need a serious overhaul. As such I cannot make any promises on when this will happen. I do want to stress that all feedback is highly appreciated, we are listening! All blog posts voicing your opinion on why this should happen are more then welcome and all comments on the VMTN thread will be read by our team.

Head over to the community thread and post your feedback:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/335123