Cloud networking

Many of you might have come across the popular VMware ESXi Reference Chart and ther vSphere PowerCLI Quick Reference Chart. I have personally distributed many of these at my VMUG meetings. But one thing I have noticed in conversations is that many system administrators take these charts and do nothing with them.

So how could you use the charts – firstly, prepare a simple worksheet and list your top 20 activities that are relevant from an operational standpoint. Then prioritize those activities and start browsing the PowerCLI & ESXi Reference chart. You will find that the charts offer commands that once run show true power to harness your VMware environment and get all relevant details.

From personal experience – for my lab and work environment there is information that I need to know from time to time. Instead of going through the GUI and navigating back & forth in the various windows and my spreadsheet I find it easy to just run a command and get the output that can be saved or imported into various file formats. One day I decided that when I get into the office at morning time I would like to see one consolidated email with a health report of my VM environment. It was easy to do – with PowerCLI and there are plenty of pre-customized scripts available on the PowerCLI blog as well.

Many of the smaller, low risk operational activities can also be transition to the NOC/Operations team and then the time carved out can be spent focussing on design/architecture or just simply new learning. Most system administrators wnat to understand which datastores are getting full, how many vMotions occured within a day, and what abnormal activity patterns exist in their environment. Then proactively script specific actions to take – email the team, page out a sysadmin, or run a command based on the output result.

VMware has significantly boosted its capabilities in automation of the environment – vMotion, Storage vMotion, Storage I/O control and so on but every environment is unique and no level of automation can cover all aspects. So some customization will always be needed.

For e.g. if you are eliminating some network VLAN’s from your network (because of whatever reason) it is easier to run one command and get the VLAN’s removed from all hosts instead of going to each of them and making the change.

From time to time you may also want to know Resource or DRS recommendations from a list of clusters or a specific cluster in order to perform capacity planning. It is easy to collect this information over time and then chart it for an easier understanding.

Now there are companies offering advanced reporting tools of such kind – VMware vCOPS, CloudPhysics, Veeam and so on. But each of them is unique in what they do and the kind of capabilities they offer. VMware and CloudPhysics atleast are built on these fundamentals of reporting and monitoring whereas Veeam has tried to go after the small to mid market including some enterprise customers. Do investigate those options for reporting and monitoring.

But the reference charts give ‘you’ the control over your environment and a true understanding of how to optimize and run the infrastructure that you manager. Wouldn’t you want non-technical users like the first level of support or a NOC to understand if there are devices which have CD drives or ISO’s connected to the VM’s and people have forgotten to remove them. Wouldn’t it be nice to know which VM’s have snapshots that haven’t been cleaned out and how large the snapshots are getting.

Because if you do care about all this stuff then you need to care about learning using reference charts and growing your knowledge one command at a time.

I hope the little bit of insight that is available in this post would encourage you to do more. A few reference links are available below and hope these help you.

Posters:

Note that if you received a hard copy poster then be aware that VMware has issued some corrections to some of the material:

Poster Issues and Corrections:

The following issues and corrections are part of the distributed hard copy posters and PDF files received before October 13th 2012, the current uploaded PDF in this post has these corrections included.

ESXi 5.1 Reference Poster

Use the following correct code instead of the code available on the poster, the poster code will cause an error.

List Registered VMs (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd -l

# vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx <datacenter> <resource pool>

Unregister a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd -s unregister /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx

Get VM power state (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx getstate

Power on a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx start

Shutdown a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx stop [ soft | hard ]

Power off a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx stop [ soft | hard ]

Reset a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx reset [soft | hard ]

Suspend a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx suspend [soft | hard ]

Resume a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx resume [soft | hard ]

Get ESXi Host Platform Information (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx getproductinfo [ product | platform | build | majorversion| minorversion ]

Get VM Uptime (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx getuptime

Get VMware Tools Status (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx gettoolslastactive

0 = Not installed/Not running

1 = Normal

5 = Intermittent Heartbeat

100 = No heartbeat. Guest operating system might have stopped responding

Create VM Snapshot (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx createsnapshot <name> <desc> <quiesce> <memory>

quiesce = Quiesce filesystem w/VMware Tools [ 0 | 1 ]

memory = Include memory state in snapshot [ 0 | 1 ]

Check if VM has a Snapshot (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx hassnapshot

Revert to VM Snapshot (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx revertsnapshot

Commit VM Snapshot (vCLI)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx removesnapshot

Forcibly Stop a VM with ESXCLI

# esxcli vm process list

# esxcli vm process kill –type [ soft | hard | force ] -w <worldId>

soft = similiar to kill or kill -SIGTERM

hard = similiar to kill -9 or kill -SIGKILL

force = use as a last resort

Under the “Virtual Machine Capabilities”. The max VM video memory for all versions is listed in KB instead of MB.

Some other important reference material

vCheck 6.0 Script (Daily Report) from Alan Renouf (Full details on how to use the script also available when you click on the vCheck link)

HA & DRS Audit from Alan Renouf

Card Builder from Cloud Physics. Irfan Ahmad (co-founder is hosting a webinar on the new product launch on June 25, 2013 at 11am Central)

Veeam vSphere Management tools