Tuesday, November 08, 2011

VMware vSphere Health Check Report v5.0.0

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9842

This script generates a health check report for the new vSphere release of VMware ESX(i) 4.x/5.x and VMware vCenter 4.x/5.x and it's managed entities. User's can now fully customize the report based on the categories that are of importance to their operating environment, including selecting specific set of ESX(i) hosts and/or Virtual Machines.

Monday, November 07, 2011

UBERAlign - disk partition alignment

UBERAlign is vSphere tool automating disk partition alignment and disk space reclamation.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

VCP 5.0 exam

Test 1: Post

http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eclassmarker%2Ecom%2Fonline-test%2Fstart%2F%3Fquiz%3Dkmh4e272723524e2&urlhash=t-rM&_t=tracking_anet

Test 2:

Adding a VM as an unmanaged desktop in VMware View

Copy of article at
http://virtualisedreality.com/2011/01/29/adding-a-vm-as-an-unmanaged-desktop-in-view-4-5/

I have just come across a situation where I wished to add a VM from one environment (completely separated test and dev environment) to VMware View in another enviorment as an unmanaged desktop. To do this with a physical server you simply install the agent and enter the connection server details during the installation. When trying to do this on a VM the final screen where you are able to enter the connection server address doesn’t appear.

It turns out this is by design and if you wish to add a VM in this manner to View you need to start the View Agent install with the following switch

VMware-viewagent-4.5.0-xxxxxx.exe /v”VDM_VC_MANAGED_AGENT=0″

This will cause it to act as if it is a physical machine and give you the oppertunity to add the View connection server.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Hidden VAAI Command

Link to original Scott Lowe article.

COPY

As some of you are probably already aware, one of the storage-related features added to vSphere 5 is support for the SCSI UNMAP command. While you would normally want this functionality enabled, there could be instances where you might want to disable this functionality. Unfortunately, there’s no option in the user interface to enable or disable SCSI UNMAP support.

However, you can use esxcli to enable or disable UNMAP support:

esxcli system advcfg setvalue --int-value [0|1] --option /VMFS3/EnableBlockDelete

Setting this value to 0 disables SCSI UNMAP support; setting the value to 1 enables it.

Many thanks to Cormac Hogan of VMware and Cody Hosterman of EMC for their help with this command.

EMC Storage and Backup solutions for VMware

ftp://Bloglink:vgeekb1og@vspecialist.emc.com/Events/VMworld/2011/Americas/Sessions/SPO3977/SPO3977_sakac_final_v1.2_w_fonts.pptx

Friday, September 02, 2011

Running VMWare Remote Console outside the browser

I found this solution at
http://www.geeklab.info/2010/02/running-vmware-remote-console-outside-the-browser/

cd /tmp
IP=the.esx.srv.ip # < fill in esx server ip address here
wget --no-check-certificate https://$IP/ui/plugin/vmware-vmrc-linux-x86.xpi
mv vmware-vmrc-linux-x86.xpi vmware-vmrc-linux-x86.zip
cd ~
mkdir -p bin/vmwareconsole # make directory bin in your own homedir
cd bin/vmwareconsole
unzip /tmp/vmware-vmrc-linux-x86.zip
cd ~/bin
ln -s vmwareconsole/plugins/vmware-vmrc . # make a symlink for easy access
vmware-vmrc # run the console


In 64 bit CentOS I had to install QtGUI library.

yum install libQtGui.so.4

or from CD/DVD media

yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=c6-media install libQtGui.so.4

VMware-vmrc Documentation

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/156057?start=0&tstart=0

Linux:

https://[IP]/ui/plugin/vmware-vmrc-linux-x86.xpi

vmware-vmrc -h [] [-u -p ] -M moid

Windows:

https://[IP]/ui/plugin/vmware-vmrc-win32-x86.exe

vmware-vmrc.exe -h [-u -p ] -M moid

Example: vmware-vmrc -h 1.2.3.4 -u administrator -p 'password' -M vm-481

There are other options. Run vmware-vmrc -help to get help.

The parameter moid is Vmware Managed Object ID which can be retrieved by VMware PERL Toolkit. Here is perl example how to get it:

my %filter_hash = create_hash(Opts::get_option('ipaddress'),
Opts::get_option('powerstatus'),
Opts::get_option('guestos'));

my $vm_views = VMUtils::get_vms ('VirtualMachine',
Opts::get_option ('vmname'),
Opts::get_option ('datacenter'),
Opts::get_option ('folder'),
Opts::get_option ('pool'),
Opts::get_option ('host'),
%filter_hash);


foreach (@$vm_views) {
my $vm_view = $_;
my $moid = $vm_view->get_property('mo_ref')->value;
print "Manage Object ID: $moid\n";
}
Minimal Centos6 for VNC server running vmware-vmrc remotely

yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=c6-media install xorg-x11-server-Xorg xorg-x11-xinit dbus-x11 xorg-x11-drv-ati twm xterm

INSTALL VMWARE TOOLS
it creates new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=c6-media install tigervnc-server
yum install xorg-x11-font*

Other useful links
https://github.com/vmware/rvc/downloads
http://kintoandar.blogspot.com/2011/06/gnome-3-vmware-console-with-vmware-vmrc.html


.

Monday, July 11, 2011

M. Sean McGee blog about UCS and HP Virtual Connect

Sean,
is proven SME in this area and he has really good articles about UCS and other server/networking topics ...

http://www.mseanmcgee.com/about/

Sunday, June 19, 2011

SpiceWorks - Free network management software & IT community

What do you get when you take network monitoring, a helpdesk, PC inventory tools, IT Reporting

and more… and combine it with an online community of IT pros exchanging practical how-tos and vendor reviews?

Spiceworks! The free “everything IT” network management software and IT community that 1.5 million IT pros worldwide use to simplify – and become better at – their jobs.



http://www.spiceworks.com/

Saturday, June 18, 2011

How to mount vmware virtual disk (vmdk)

The Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) is a collection of C libraries, code samples, utilities, and documentation to help you create or access VMware virtual disk storage. The kit includes:

  • The Virtual Disk and Disk Mount libraries, sets of C function calls to manipulate virtual disk files.
  • C++ code samples that you can build with either Visual Studio or the GNU C compiler.
  • Documentation about the VDDK libraries and the command-line utilities.
  • The Disk Mount utility to access files and file systems in offline virtual disks on Windows or Linux guest virtual machines.
  • The Virtual Disk Manager utility to manipulate offline virtual disk on Windows or Linux (clone, create, relocate, rename, grow, shrink, or defragment).

http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vddk/

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

vSphere 5 Details - unofficial

In February this year, virtualization.info reported about VMware which exposed some of the upcoming features of vSphere 5 during its Partner Exchange. Last week even more details appeared online, these details leaked on a Turkish Web Forum, but were removed later. The post itself can still be retrieved from Google Cache though.

Besides, Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) for Storage, Host-based replication for Site Recovery Manager, and Network I/O control for Virtual Machines, vSphere 5 will feature:
  • Build on the vSphere ESXi hypervisor architecture
  • vSphere Auto Deploy combining host profiles, Image Builder and PXE
  • Unified CLI framework, allowing consistency of authentication, roles and auditing.
  • Support for up to 1 TB of memory
  • Support for 32 vCPU’s per VM
  • Nonhardware accelerated 3D graphics for Windows Aero support
  • USB 3.0 device support
  • UEFI virtual BIOS
  • Host UEFI boot support
  • New GUI to configure multicore vCPUs
  • Client-connected USB devices
  • Smart card reader support for VMs
  • Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6 (Snow Leopard) guest OS support
  • Support for up to 512 VMs
  • Support for up to 160 Logical CPUs and 2 TB or RAM
  • Improved SNMP support
  • Storage driven storage delivery based on the VMware-Aware Storage APIs
  • Improved version of the Cluster File System, VMFS5
  • Accelerator for specific use with View (VDI) workloads, providing a read cache optimized for recognizing, handling and deduplicating VDI client images.
  • iSCSI user interface support
  • Storage APIs – Array Integration: Thin Provisioning enabling reclaiming blocks of a thin provisioned LUN on the array when a virtual disk is deleted
  • Swap to SSD
  • 2TB+ LUN support
  • Storage vMotion snapshot support
  • vNetwork Distributed Switch improvements providing improved visibility in VM traffic
  • ESXi Firewall protecting the ESXi 5.0 management interface
  • A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex.
  • vCenter Server Appliance
  • Inventory Extensibility: providing a manager to monitor partner extensions.
  • vCenter Solutions Manager, providing a consistent interface to configure and monitor vCenter-integrated solutions developed by VMware and third parties.
  • System message logging enhancements
  • Revamped VMware High Availability (HA) with Fault Domain Manager
  • All hosts in cluster can be primary nodes
  • Cluster also uses shared storage as a channel for heartbeat detection

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

VMware Virtual Machine Remote Console

VMware vmrc (Virtual Machine Remote Console)
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/156057?start=15&tstart=0
http://www.no-x.org/?p=458

VMware player as a remote console
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8840

VMRC to ESXi Guest
http://traviskensil.posterous.com/vmrc-to-esxi-guest

VMware-esxi-server vmware-vmrc console linux

vmware-vmrc vmware console for esxi-server via linux because there is no vsphere client for linux around at the moment!

1) download vmware server (in my case VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.exe

2) unpack it (install it on a windows machine)
3) get the file Programs/VMware/VMware Server/tomcat/webapps/ui/plugin/vmware-vmrc-linux-x86.xpi
4) rename it to .zip, and unpack it
5) change dir to subfolder 'plugins' and start ./vmware-vmrc