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’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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Last night I spent two hours talking to a couple of developers from the Site Recovery Manager group. They turned out to be excellent people who listened to my experiences with SRM. I felt empowered as a small voice for the SRM user base. They were already well aware of some of the issues I addressed, others seemed to spark their interest.

IP customization obviously needs work. An enterprise class user interface is needed and it should not look like a spreadsheet. We talked about policy and rule based ip customization. This would work well in my environment since I change the 2nd and 3rd octet. For example in site A you may have the ip address 10.20.30.40. In site B this machine would have its ip changed to 10.40.130.40. The 10.40.30.0/24 network is already in use as a server vlan (vlan 30) there. Policy or rule based, in the inventory mappings possibly, would let me say that I want the destination ip to always have 100 added to the 3rd octet and use 40 for the 2nd octet if the 2nd octet is 20. Then I would never have to do anything else for ip’s. Of course exceptions and additional expressions would be awesome.

Failback is another key point. Currently SRM is a one way product. You set it all up, test your plan to prove success, and you wait for an event that justifies hitting that red run button. Now you are up and running in a new and strange place, but with no easy way back. You have to create your ip customizations and build your protection group and recovery plans. The ability to do all of this ahead of time needs to be there. Your protection group should have a failover and a failback plan section of the recovery plan. Your configurations should be stored in both sites. It would be nice to be able to test the failback as well, however this could get complicated I would think.

Deep recovery plan testing is something you can do now, but it requires considerable development on the customer end. Of course I am talking about proving your recovery plan beyond simply having the virtual machine power up. A virtual machine is useless! It’s what we have running in them that matters most. Exchange, Citrix, DNS, Active Directory, Oracle, or SQL insert any number of applications and services you may use, these are what you are really after. You can write your own scripts to check that these function. Then have exit codes from the scripts that let SRM say if a VM had an error and thus the DR plan. It would be excellent if VMWare provided these scripts for the default installations of major applications like Exchange or SQL. In addition a place for the VMWare user community to post their own scripts. I would really like to see more than just checking for a process to be running, but will take anything. This would also lead us into scheduling DR tests in the middle of the night or weekend. We can sleep while the systems make sure the DR plan is good once a week. Notify of results with an email you check on Monday. I think this is the future of DR tests. If VMWare doesn’t do it someone else will.

Test bubbles are also something I would like to see improved. Currently the test bubble is there just to allow testing to work on a single ESX host. You can create an isolated vlan (OSI layer 2) to allow VM’s to communicate across ESX hosts. However there is no built in solution to allow for routing. We have tackled this at my shop with a linux machine running in the recovery site as a VM. It has 4 virtual nics and I have created 3 isolated vlans for testing my servers. The fourth virtual nic is available if needed to allow internet connectivity to the machines for testing. This allows me to have a 3 subnet test bubble with routing inside of it. VMWare could package up a quick appliance with a web interface that you could configure all of the subnets and it would create virtual nics for you. There are obvious issues that could come up if you allow your test machines to communicate with production or the internet. An example would be an email server brought up in test allowed to connect to internet and delivering email even the it’s production twin already did.

I would like to give a big THANK YOU to the developers standing at the SRM station in the VMWare booth. It was a pleasure speaking to you. I really do appreciate your work on SRM. The product is wonderful and appears to have an excellent future.

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VMWorld organizers,

I hope you take the suggestions of the attendees. More labs were needed. The vsphere performance lab was slap full each time I tried to get in. Many of us were turned away. Then we attempted to get into other labs and they were each full or past the start time and the conference workers would not let additional people in. The only other activity available at the time was the self paced labs. The line for the self paced labs had about 400 people in it.

More content is required to keep us busy on Monday’s. I eventually did make it into two labs but wish to attend more. We will just skip talking about the no lunch on Monday issue.

/rant

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Well I am here in San Francisco for VMWorld 2009. If I find any good content I’ll be sure to post it here. If anyone would like to meet up for conversation, white boarding, or to share war stories you can email me tsevmworld2009 at thesystemsengineer dot com.

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An easy way to find WWNN of a Clariion LUN inside of ESX.

esxcfg-mpath -lv | grep ^Disk | grep -v vmhba0 | awk '{print $3,$5,$2}' | cut -b15-

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I was asked a question today and I thought it might be a good idea to begin posting the answers to some of the questions I am asked.

What is VMFS?

VMFS is Virtual Machine File System. It’s just the file system that exists on the VMWare ESX servers.
In it exists files one of which is vmdk, virtual machine disk.
The is the vm guest itself. Instead of the virtual machines having a hard drive they have a vmdk.
All of the vmdk’s are contained on a vmfs. Vmfs, ntfs, fat, fat32 these are all file systems.

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VMware Consolidated Backup is going to continue to mature into a great solution for backing up VM’s. Some of the early adopters may have experienced problems with centralized storage. If you have more than one path to your centralized storage it has been recommended in VMWare’s documentation that you disable all inactive paths. This to me does not seem acceptable as part of the reason you paid for your highly available storage was for it to be “HIGHLY AVAILABLE”. This was a big issue for me.

VMWare VCB 1.1.0 apparently works fine with PowerPath. I have configured this and I am currently backing up about 20 guests. I am using Windows 2003 SP2 and PowerPath 5.1.0. The version of VCB I am using is exactly VMware-vcb-64559. I am also using Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5.0.4

I am unsure if VCB and PowerPath are officially supported yet. I am unable to find any documentation on VMWare’s site that says it is supported. I am also unable to find anything in release notes or the forums. It was recommended to me by vmware support to see if it resolved a disk access issue we seemed to randomly be having. I’m happy to say that after installing PowerPath I am able to backup all of my vm’s I have in vmlist so far. I would try it in a lab environment for a bit. I’d be interested to hear if it works for anyone else.

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