Vcenter on BAFM

Rename a Standard Port Group on all hosts in a cluster

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 10:59:27 +0000

Well, I recently decided to rename a bunch of my Standard Port Groups, since they did no longer reflect the network they were providing. Since I’m a lazy bastard (well lazy as in click lazy), I wrote this little PowerCLI script:

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param(
 [string] $vcenter,
 [string] $cluster,
 [string] $oldpg,
 [string] $newpg,
 [string] $vlan )

# Add the VI-Snapin if it isn't loaded already
if ( (Get-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null )
{
 Add-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core"
}

If ( !($vcenter) -or !($cluster) -or !($oldpg) -or !($newpg) -or !($vlan) )
{
 Write-Host `n "pg-cluster-rename: <vcenter-server> <cluster> <oldpg> <newpg>" `n
 Write-Host "This script renames each port group with the name <oldpg> to <newpg>" `n
 Write-Host " <vcenter-server> - DNS name of your vCenter server." `n
 Write-Host " <cluster> - Display-Name of the vCenter cluster, on which we are"
 Write-Host " gonna create the new portgroup." `n
 Write-Host " <oldpg> - Name of the old Port Group that is to be replaced (ie VLAN2)." `n
 Write-Host " <newpg> - Name of the new Port Group (ie PG-VLAN2-Produktion)." `n
 Write-Host " <vlan> - VLAN-ID for of the new port group." `n
 exit 1
}

Connect-VIServer -Server $vcenter

Get-Cluster $cluster | Get-VMHost | Get-VirtualSwitch -Name $vswitch | `
 New-VirtualPortGroup -Name $pg -VLanId $vlan
Get-Cluster $cluster | Get-VM | Get-NetworkAdapter | Where { $_.NetworkName -eq "$oldpg" } | `
 Set-NetworkAdapter -NetworkName $newpg -Confirm:$false
Get-Cluster $cluster | Get-VMHost | %{Get-View (Get-View $_.ID).configmanager.networkSystem} | %{
 $_.RemovePortGroup($oldpg)
}

Disconnect-VIServer -server $vcenter -Confirm:$false

This script basically takes a vCenter instance and a single cluster, then creates a new Port Group on each host, after which it reconfigures all VMs possessing a virtual NIC with that Port Group and then deletes the old Port Group.

VMware design rules

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 09:52:13 +0000

I’m just got back from four days in Rostock over at S&N, where I was attending a VMware design course and here’s a list of questions I did ask the trainer:

What’s the disadvantage of having a 1016 ported vSwitch ?
Any clues on how to exchange the default certificate of the Virtual Center ?
Are there any tools to stress test the virtual system ?
Are there any performance impacts of having more than 10 users in Virtual Center ?
Any clues and/or guides on how to do time synchronization in VMware guests, especially Linux guests ?
What’s the preferred NIC type for Linux guests ?
Any clues to using Raw Device Mappings with VMotion ?
Is there a way of defining CPU masks on a global level ?

Answers:

More VirtualCenter troubles

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 09:44:54 +0000

Well, after my co-worker switched the VirtualCenter certificates with one produced by our RA a few days ago, I can’t clone anything using a customization specification anymore.

Unable to decrypt passwords in customization specification

Guess, we’re shit outa luck. At least both of those linked VMTN discussions don’t contain any (that is for us) workable solution (well besides storing the password in cleartext in the spec – which ain’t sooo good). Gonna bug him tomorrow to open up a VMware support request, maybe that’ll help somewhat. I sure hope so.

VMware vCenter: is not connected

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 09:08:15 +0000

Well, today I once again had the case where a virtual machine (in my case a Virtual Machine Template) was kinda stuck. You couldn’t remove the template (as in the entries for “Remove from inventory” was grayed out) and you couldn’t re-add the Virtual Machine’s VMX from the datastore browser either.

VI Client - Disconnected templates

Though, a simple putting the host into maintenance mode and rebooting helped that problem. Maybe there is a simpler solution for this, I just don’t know about it.

VMware: New VirtualCenter 2-5 Update 4

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:47:01 +0000

As many people on the VM-Planet already blogged about this, I ain’t gonna write just about it. Let’s turn the clock back a few months, to January 2008.

As the institution I work for, is part of the DFN we took the opportunity to be a part of the " I want you to run our RA"-gang. In January 2008 we thought about changing the vCenter certificate. Now, apparently there’s a slight difference between the DFN-PCA and what VMware considers common practice.

vCenter: Removing VSC custom attributes

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 20:10:01 +0000

Well, yesterday I got pissed of those Virtual Storage Console custom attributes.

Currently we don’t use the Provisioning & Cloning feature of the VSC, thus we don’t need the custom attributes. After poking around, I decided to write a short PowerCLI script to do the task.

It’s really rather simple, so here goes:

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param( [string] $vCenter )

# Add the VI-Snapin if it isn't loaded already
if ( (Get-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null )
{
 Add-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core"
}

If ( !($vCenter) )
{
 Write-Host
 Write-Host "vcenter-remove-vsc-attributes: <vcenter-server>"
 Write-Host
 Write-Host " <vcenter-server> - DNS name of your vCenter server."
 Write-Host
 exit 1
}

Connect-VIServer -Server $vCenter

Remove-CustomAttribute -CustomAttribute "PnC.CustSpec", "PnC.Deployed", "PnC.GroupID", "PnC.Source" -Confirm:$false

Disconnect-VIServer -server $vCenter -Confirm:$false

VMs in Alarm state after scheduled maintainance

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 10:38:04 +0000

Well, I’m back at work after three weeks of vacation (some pictures to follow) and the provider hosting our disaster datacenter had their annual (or is it monthly now?) SAN maintainance, so we shut down everything over there by 9:00 am.

After things were back up around 5pm, I booted the ESX hosts, however the VMs we’re all displaying the alert state - as if either the VMs had an HA event or we’re using to much CPU time. It didn’t matter whether or not the VM was running or not, the state persisted.

VMware Update Manager issues

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:14:28 +0000

Well, I recently (last Wednesday) had a lot of trouble with Update Manager.

First I thought, upgrading vCenter and modules to 5.0U1 would solve my troubles, however it did not. Update Manager was still complaining about something. Since neither in the vCenter Update Manager nor the vCenter log itself were having any useful information I enabled SSHd and the ESXi Shell via the vCenter client:

SSH’ed into the ESX host and looked at /var/log/esxupdate.log, and found this particular log:

Microsoft Cluster on VMware and Devices

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:40:44 +0000

Well, once again the Microsoft Cluster on VMware bit my ass … As you might know, MSCS on VMware is a particular kind of pain, with each upgrade you end up with the same problem over and over again (SCSI reservations on the RDM-LUNs being one, and the passive node not booting being the other).

So I opened up another support case with VMware, and the responded like this:

Please see this kb entry: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1016106

Reconfiguring NTP settings vCenter-wide

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:55:40 +0000

I recently started reinstalling all my ESX hosts, so I wrote up a short script that is reconfiguring all hosts and sets the NTP configuration according to my wish:

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param( [string] $vcenter, [string] $ntpserver1, [string] $ntpserver2 )

# Add the VI-Snapin if it isn't loaded already
if ( (Get-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null )
{
 Add-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core"
}

If ( !($vcenter) -or !($ntpserver1) -or !($ntpserver2) )
{
 Write-Host `n "vcenter-ntp-reconfigure: <vcenter-server> <ntpserver1> <ntpserver2>" `n
 Write-Host "This script clears the NTP servers currently configured and" `n
 Write-Hsot "adds the ones supplied on the command line." `n
 Write-Host " <vcenter-server> - DNS name of your vCenter server." `n
 Write-Host " <ntpserver1> - NTP server #1" `n
 Write-Host " <ntpserver2> - NTP server #2" `n
 exit 1
}

Connect-VIServer -Server $vcenter

foreach ($esxhost in Get-VMHost)
{
 Get-VMHost $esxhost | Remove-VMHostNtpServer -Confirm:$false -NtpServer (Get-VMHost $esxhost | `
 Get-VMHostNtpServer)
 Get-VMHost $esxhost | Add-VMHostNtpServer -NtpServer $ntpserver1
 Get-VMHost $esxhost | Add-VMHostNtpServer -NtpServer $ntpserver2
}

Disconnect-VIServer -server $vcenter -Confirm:$false

As you can see, the script takes the vCenter hostname and two NTP servers and basically applies it to each host in your vCenter environment.

Empty Port SSL after ADAM installation

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:43:56 +0000

I’ve been meaning to post this, but never actually got around to doing that. When installing vCenter 5.0, an instance of ADAM is installed, which stores all the configration data for Linked Mode.

It basically boils down to running this script and rebooting the box:

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reg DELETE "HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetservicesADAM_VMwareVCMSDSParameters" /v "Port SSL" /f
reg ADD "HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetservicesADAM_VMwareVCMSDSParameters" /v "Port SSL" /t REG_DWORD /d 0000027c /f

This is no new invention of myself, just writing it down for myself from here or here.

Changing the vCenter hostname

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:56:10 +0000

I recently reinstalled the vCenter Server at work, and in my never ending wisdom cough, I decided to do that on new hardware. That entitled using the same host name plus the appendix _NEW. Now, I know this isn’t conforming with DNS naming schemes (iirc underscore isn’t a valid DNS char), however it worked …

So once I had everything installed on the new hardware, I switched the ESX servers from the old vCenter to the freshly installed one. Once that was finished, I shut down the old vCenter server, changed IP address and host name of the new one and rebooted. That basically worked, even though suddenly every ESX in my inventory was disconnected. After reconnecting all ESX servers everything was back online.

Create an offline snapshot of a VM

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:11:25 +0000

We’re currently thinking about automating Windows Updates and the involved disaster snapshot-copy to a degree, where we don’t need to intervene anymore.

Right now, we already have a rudimentary scheduler in place, which does the reboots for some (200 ..) systems already. Now, we’d like to extend it to also cover the bi-weekly Windows Update spree.

Since PowerShell (and PowerCLI) work quite well with vSphere automation, I cooked up the below script to first shutdown a virtual machine (for snapshot consistency reasons), then take a snapshot and power on the virtual machine again afterwards.

Modified SnapReminder

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 16:06:57 +0000

Well, PowerCLI makes my life a little bit easier. Believe it or not, each of us vCenter infrastructure admins has one of these: a Windows admin, thinking a snapshot is also a backup. Thankfully, Alan Renouf over at virtu-al.net wrote the SnapReminder, which already helped me a lot! However, occasionally the script isn’t finding the snapshot author (for whatever reason).

Since I want a notification in that case, I modified the script a little bit to suit my needs.

Fix Path Selection Policy for a whole vCenter Cluster

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:38:49 +0000

These last few weeks, I’ve been toying with PowerCLI (and PowerShell for that matter). One thing I do have to say, is that Microsoft finally did it right! It’s a useable, program-able command line interface for Windows after all! Thanks to Ivo Beerens and his post " Best practices for HP EVA, vSphere 4 and Round Robin multi-pathing", I was able to come up with the below:

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# LICENSE: GNU General Public License v2. (see LICENSE.txt)
# COPYRIGHT: Copyright 2010 Christian Heim <christian.heim@barfoo.org>

# Add the VI-Snapin if it isn't loaded already
if ( (Get-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null )
{
 Add-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core"
}

if ($args.length -lt 2) {
 Write-Host
 Write-Host "fix_multipathing: "
 Write-Host " - Display-Name of the vCenter cluster, we should check all LUNs"
 Write-Host " on all available Hosts, and set the Path Selection Policy"
 Write-Host " to the selected one."
 Write-Host ""
 Write-Host " - Path Selection Policy"
 Write-Host " Possible:"
 Write-Host " - RoundRobin (VMW_PSP_RR, Round Robin)"
 Write-Host " - Fixed (VMW_PSP_FIXED, Fixed)"
 Write-Host " - MostRecentlyUsed (VMW_PSP_MRU , Most Recently Used)"
 Write-Host
 exit 1
}

$vcserver = "vcenter.home.barfoo.org"
$cluster = $args[0]
$target_policy = $args[1]

# Since I do have only SVC-Disks connected to my hosts, I limit the search to those
$canonical_name = "naa.6005076801808021*"

Write-Host "Target vCenter Cluster: " $cluster
Write-Host "Target PSP: " $target_policy
Write-Host

switch ($target_policy) {
 RoundRobin { $display_policy = "VMW_PSP_RR"; }
 MostRecentlyUsed { $display_policy = "VMW_PSP_MRU"; }
 Fixed { $display_policy = "VMW_PSP_FIXED"; }
 default { Write-Warning "Unknown PSP selected! Please consult the help and try again."; exit }
}

Connect-VIServer $vcserver >/dev/null 2>&1

Write-Host "Found "@(Get-VMHost -location ( get-cluster $cluster ) | Get-ScsiLun -CanonicalName $canonical_name -LunType "disk" | where {$_.MultipathPolicy -ne $target_policy }).Count" LUNs in "$cluster" not using Path Selection Policy "$display_policy
Get-VMHost -location ( get-cluster $cluster ) | Get-ScsiLun -CanonicalName $canonical_name -LunType "disk" | where {$_.MultipathPolicy -ne $target_policy } | Set-ScsiLun -MultipathPolicy $target_policy >/dev/null 2>&1

This works great, however you could make it work on the whole vCenter inventory, which I don’t want. We usually add LUNs to a single cluster at one time. Only thing you might need to change, is the canonical name. Mine simply says “find all SVC LUNs” and you might need to change it, if you’re using a different storage.

Custom certificates in VMware vSphere

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:34:57 +0000

Finally, after about 6 months (I last talked about that on February 25th, when Virtual Center 2.5U4 was released) our troubles with our " custom" certificates seems to be resolved! As it turns out, it really was our fault and not VMware’s.

When generating the pfx from the signed certificate and the key-file, you need to supply a password, otherwise the vCenter service is unable to utilize the private key of the pfx, since it’s unable to access the PFX with the default password ( testpassword is the default for Virtual Center as well as vSphere).

VI Client: Changing the language from the system default

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:12:45 +0000

Well, as I am in fact running a german Windows XP, the VI Client started displaying all menus and operations in German when I updated to 2.5u2. Normally, I wouldn’t have much of a problem with that, but recently it started to annoy me, since the translation is a bit off from the real meaning of much of the operations.

So today, in the morning I started looking for ways to revert the VI Client back to displaying everything in English. And guess what. There’s no way to switch the language from the VI Client itself. There’s just a workaround.

More VirtualCenter troubles (fini)

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:03:46 +0000

Well, today the support request came back. Seems one of the originally linked VMTN dicussions really is the only way:

Export the customization specification
Edit the XML file
Import it again

The related part inside the customization specification should then look like this:

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<type>vim.vm.customization.Password</type>
<plainText>true</plainText>
<value>Password01</value>
</password>

So if you ever think about switching the default VirtualCenter certificate (for whatever reason), make sure you use the above workaround. Otherwise VirtualCenter is gonna fail miserably during the customization phase of the cloning process.