Just attended a session that did a decent overview of the vMA.

MA6580 Bridge the ESX/ESXi Management Gap Using the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) – Tips & Tricks Included.

With ESX classic no longer something we should be using, we need a way to really manage ESXi. vMA is a VM that you can download from VMware. It is built on centos and contains the vsphere cli as well as the sdk. There is quite a community of people developing scripts for use on it. The VM is also supported by VMware.

From the session there was one site that caught my eye.
Virtuallyghetto.com. William Lam has apparently written some excellent scripts for the vMA. A security hardening script and health check script. The session explained the security hardening script has every setting from the security document from VMware.

vMA 4.1 was recently release and you can update to this later version from inside your vMA 4.0 using vima-update. You’ll need to use sudo of course.

vMA can assist you with collecting logs from your ESXi hosts.

Here are some vMA best practices collected from the session.
1. Put vMA on a management network.
2. Use static ip and FQDN and DNS.
3. Enabled NTP using UTC, ESXi only uses UTC.
4. Use vMA to connect to vCLI.
5. Limit use of resxtop, resxtop should be used for real time troubleshooting not monitoring.
6. Cleanup local accounts left behind when using new vMA or destroying it.

I will have to make sure my co-workers look over the slides once they are available.

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I have seen what appears to be the VMware person who schedules sessions a few times now. This leads me to believe VMware is aware of the overflow of interested people. I have tried to sell my spot in line for $20-$100 with no luck. People seem to think they have paid their due to sit down in a session, I agree.

VMware we love you. We just really want to hear what you have to say!

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VMworld 2010 so far has been informative. It’s obvious in my first few sessions that VMware is serious about cloud computing. Most of my sessions have either shown or eluded to upcoming cloud oriented products and tools from VMware. They appear to even be providing the software we will need to really run our own private clouds. This appears to heavily depend on orchestrator. Keep an eye our for vCloud Director and the vCloud api.

I would be happier if they would allow us to schedule sessions as the lines are quite long to get into sessions. Only one session so far today has been full before I got there.

Breakfast was light, I was hungry. Lunch was a little on the light side, and no water? Coffee was good but seems to have disappeared now. Recycling is big this year and that is welcomed.

The conference bag is a nice backpack. My pocket guide took me to the wrong room; I will have to check my conference bag for the bigger book because I didn’t see it last night. I’m a winner for CSC’s little flyer game. We’ll see what I really have won later. I think they have won some contact info .

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I did not see this one coming. I do see some reasons for it and some benefits, just didn’t expect to see it.

McAfee makes some really nice products for the enterprise. ePolicy Orchestrator is something I really like, use daily, and have used for almost ten years. McAfee Virus Scan Enterprise 7.0+ has been leaps and bounds better than 4.5. 8.7i is wonderful. Some of the features I use are custom file access denial rules to block read and write to PST files. This allowed for PST to be completely eradicated in my shop and for us to meet our email policies. ePolicy’s rogue system detection is another amazing piece.

I suppose processor based anti malware could be interesting. Time will tell. You have my attention Intel. McAfee already has my business.

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I’m sitting here doing some work on VMware view listening to Historical Apollo 16 Audio recordings. These guys communicate quite well. It’s amazing how professional and well these guys communicate.

John Watts Young (johnny) and Charles Moss Duke, Jr. (charlie) have been working on the surface of the moon for the last hour. Drilling holes, fixing air hoses, taking pictures, etc. The culture of my world is different from these guys. I’ll make a conscisous effort to be more like these guys in the future. Even Houston is impressive. They are blunt when they need to be, passive at the right times, and generally able to show the excitement of standing on the moon.

Hah, “sound doesn’t travel too good in a vacuum but it jumped”, they are taking some pictures.

Soma.fm is an online radio station that I use sometimes. One of the streams is Mission Control audio. I’m here in my chair living this event for the first time along with some ambient chillout style music. You see, I was not even born when these guys were making history. Some 238,000 miles from earth and 9 years before I was born. I’m sure they never thought anyone would be listening to this in their homes 29 years later.

Mr. Young & Mr. Duke, I really appreciate all you have done for the space program. I hope you are both enjoying retirement. I am enjoying listening to the fine job you guys did. Would love to meet you if you are ever in Houston.

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If you run your TSM on AIX read on…

Tape drives need to be changed out from time to time. The process can get tricky if you don’t remember the steps. I’ll give them to you in a bit and you can always reference this page when you need to perform this action again. This is test on AIX 5.3 and Tivoli 5.5.

Step 1. Log into TSM and determine which drive you need to change. You can use query drive, show library and query path f=d to get this information. Lets assume it is a drive named “DRIVE00″ and that its path is /dev/rmt0.
Step 2. Delete the path definition in TSM for the Drive. An example command would be “del path server1 drive00 srct=server destt=drive library0. You can run a help delete path. Remember the settings because we can use them later.
Step 3. Delete the drive definition in TSM. An example command would be “del drive

rmdev -dl lb0
rmdev -dl rmt1
rmdev -dl rmt2
rmdev -dl rmt3
Smit, Devices, Tivoli, Discover Supported Devices, Both fscsi adapters. This gives us lb’s and mt’s. We do not want mt’s.
rmdev -dl mt0
rmdev -dl mt1
rmdev -dl mt2

run cfgmgr in aix to get the rmt’s back.

delete path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE00 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DR LIBR=ML6020
delete path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE01 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DR LIBR=ML6020
delete path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE02 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DR LIBR=ML6020
delete path ZPHBACKUP01 ML6020 SRCT=SERV DESTT=LIBR

delete drive ML6020 DRIVE00
delete drive ML6020 DRIVE01
delete drive ML6020 DRIVE02

stop/start tivoli storage manager

define path ZPHBACKUP01 ML6020 SRCT=SERV DESTT=LIBR DEVI=/dev/lb0

def drive ML6020 DRIVE00
def drive ML6020 DRIVE01
def drive ML6020 DRIVE02

define path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE00 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DRIVE LIBR=ML6020 DEVI=/dev/rmt0
define path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE01 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DRIVE LIBR=ML6020 DEVI=/dev/rmt1
define path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE02 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DRIVE LIBR=ML6020 DEVI=/dev/rmt2

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1) From TSM:
Save the output from the device queries, and save the current device configuration (the filename is optional):

query library
query drive f=d
query path f=d
query devclass f=d
backup devconfig [ filename=devconfig.bak ]

2) From AIX:
List the tape devices:

lsdev -Cc tape

Remove the drive and library device names:

rmdev -dl

For example, if the drive device name is /dev/rmt1:

rmdev -dl rmt1

3) Upgrade Atape
Ftp the Atape driver in binary mode from ftp://index.storsys.ibm.com/devdrvr/AIX or ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/storage/devdrvr/AIX

Remove the older Atape driver (optional):

installp -u Atape.driver

Install and commit the Atape driver. For example, if you downloaded the file to /tmp/Atape.12.0.8.0.bin:

installp -acXd /tmp/Atape.12.0.8.0.bin all

Configure the tape device:

cfgmgr -v

(-v is not required but will show where it hangs if it does)

Verify the new devices are Available:

lsdev -Cc tape

(Note: While not always absolutely necessary, it is strongly recommended to reboot the system after upgrading the Atape.driver)

4) From TSM:
While it is recommended to remove and redefine the paths after any hardware change, including upgrading Atape.driver, sometimes it is not necessary to do anything else after upgrading Atape. If the activity log reports I/O errors for the library or drives, sometimes it is only necessary to force the TSM server to communicate with the drives to resolve them:

update path srctype=server desttype=drive library= device= online=yes

If this does not resolve the I/O errors, then continue with steps 5-7.

5) Delete the drive and library paths
For each drive:

delete path srctype=server desttype=drive library=

For the library:

delete path srctype=server desttype=library

6) Redefine the drive and library paths

define path srctype=server desttype=library device=/dev/ online=yes
define path srctype=server desttype=library library= devicename=/dev/ online=yes

(Use the devconfig file as a guide for the definitions.)

References:
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for AIX Administrator’s Reference
Atape device driver README ftp://index.storsys.ibm.com/devdrvr/AIX/README

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Cisco’s 3 wheel car. Looks awesome. Sitting in Mandalay Bar at Cisco Live Networkers 2010.

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NINJA!

The Lancope NetFlow ninja’s almost got the jump on me.

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EMC World 2010 is coming to an end. I am in my last session here and finally have some time to update you all on what I have seen. Really it is what everyone has seen as it was announced here. The star of the show, VPlex. This allows for active/active storage using synchronous distances.

The theme this year is “The Journey to the Private Cloud”. My company started this journey years ago so it’s nice to get a conference dedicated to what we have been working to accomplish for years. We have been looking for some technology to allow us to “flip the switch”. We want our workloads to be mobile and unbolted from the physical machines. This process started with VMware many years ago. As we close in on 95% of the workloads virtualized the next task is to unbolt the workload from the data center.

Now moving a workload from a data center has been possible for a while. However moving that workload back has been tricky. The main factor is time and effort. You could restore a work load and then update clients to point towards it. Then you had to do the same to go back. VMware SRM made this a little easier but it isn’t quite “flip the switch”.

Flipping the switch is an action. We want this to be a repeatable action. We want the effort reduce to a minimum as well as the time. Days and Weeks is not good enough for us to be able to move a workload. Hours is better but still not what we are looking for. We want minutes and seconds. We also do not want the workload to be halted when we “flip the switch”. This meant a few things had to exist that just were not possible until recently. You needed uninterrupted network access to the workload. You also needed writable access to the data in all locations. You then need the workload to move between physical computing devices without interruption.

Moving a workload between physical computing devices is possible with vMotion when using VMware. This has been in existence for many years but only inside of a data center.

Cisco has solved the issue of uninterrupted network access to the workload with Nexus. A new paid for feature for Nexus 7K’s called Overlay Transport Virtualization. OTV allows for stretching a vlan but stops all of the bad stuff your network people will tell you about doing this. The IP of the vm now does not have to change even though it is running in a data center that is 100km away from where it was.

EMC has solved the uninterrupted access to storage, both reading and writing. Active/Active access to storage with disks that are separated by 100km. VPlex allows for synchronous access to both storage arrays while presenting a single LUN to the vSphere host.

You then simply vMotion the VM and no one is the wiser. This is all brand new technology and information is trickling out about it. The next year or so will be very interesting with this new capability. EMC has said they are working on increasing to asynchronous distances which will open up a new world to mobile workloads.

Very interesting indeed.

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