Applications are now open here: http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2013/03/vexpert-2013-applications-are-now-open.html

The vExpert 2013 applications are now open. This is a great group to be a part of, so if you have been an active contributor to the VMware community, I highly recommend applying! There are three tracks you can follow though for application, so follow the link above for more information and guidance on applying. This last year I was lucky enough to be awarded the title, and I hope to be able to retain it this year – as such I have been blogging as regularly as possible and have also released some cool little utilities, scripts and other bits and pieces to the community. Hopefully this will all pay off and I will be able to retain vExpert status through 2013

Over the past year, John Troyer has done a sterling job keeping the group going and organising events and other collateral, so much thanks go to him and the other vExperts who have of course helped out where possible.

Good luck on the applications and don’t forget to keep contributing. This is what makes the community stronger!

So there is a fun website called “CloudCred” that allows individuals or teams to participate in various tasks and challenges –  everything from technical challenges to social and fun are covered and it is quite a good team building exercise, apart from the leaderboard challenge aspect!

One of the tasks is to blog about my team members and include links to their own blogs. We have quite a few team members so I can’t cover all of them, but here goes:

• GreggRobertson5 - Great blog covering wide variety of topics – a lot of great certification stuff too - http://thesaffageek.co.uk/
• dawoo - Excellent resources also covering a broad selection of topics - blog.vmote.net
• Paul Wood - Nice technical blog, mainly focused around VMware - http://www.virtualwood.co.uk/
• Yattong - Cloud / VMware guru - http://blog.vmpact.com
• Ather Beg - Good detailed blog posts around VMware and other tech - http://atherbeg.wordpress.com
• GrantsFriend - Great Citrix and Virtualisation blog - http://uszaim.wordpress.com/

Of course this task is for our team – Xtravirt Limited, so we also have a company blog you can go and visit for some excellent content around the Cloud and Virtualisation industry.

The other weekend I managed to get some spare time to do another update to my ESXi 5.0 / 5.1 Host Backup & Restore GUI utility, this time it has been updated to version 1.3. I didn’t post up the changes as it was done by special request from one of my blog readers (thanks Flavio!) However, after receiving more comments with a few others having a similiar issue to what Flavio had, I thought I should definitely post the updated version here, which should hopefully solve the issues some people are seeing.

The changes are based on feedback received in the comments I have received about the utility relating to exceptions received when users in some circumstances try to backup their host configurations. Specifically the exception message “Exception caught: Get-VMHost VMHost with name ‘xxx’ was not found using the specified filter(s).”

You can check the utility out over on it’s page here.

Updates (17-02-2013) – version 1.3:

• Hosts are retrieved using a new method (for both backup and restore options)

In a recent blog post, I showed a simple method of outputting a list of hosts with their friendly names, as well as their MoRef (Managed Object Reference) names alongside eachother, enabling you to match up which host belongs to which MoRef. I wanted to take that a little further, with a function that is able to return the friendly name of a host’s MoRef that is input into the function. I have used this is a larger reporting script, where I can only get the MoRef of a host via it’s property within a cluster object. Basically, I look for any Failover hosts (admission control policy), which is an array, and the hosts are listed as indexed objects of this array. They are also only displayed as MoRef names, so at this point, instead of inserting the MoRef into my results, I insert the MoRef into this function, return the friendly name, and input this instead. Which allows the person reading the report to easily identify the host!

$cluster.ExtensionData.Configuration.DasConfig.AdmissionControlPolicy.FailoverHosts <- In this example, $cluster is a particular cluster using the “specify a failover host” policy, and ”FailoverHosts” is the array, with each object within containing a host MoRef. For example FailoverHosts[0].Value would be one instance, and may equate to “HostSystem-host-28″ for example.

So here is the function. It takes two mandatory parameters: -MoRef (the MoRef of the host in question of course), and -Cluster (the name of the Cluster to do the lookup in) – the function loops through each host in this cluster to look for a host that matches the input MoRef.

Function Get-VMHostByMoRef() {

<#
.SYNOPSIS
Fetches host name by input MoRef and Cluster to look in

.DESCRIPTION
Fetches host name by input MoRef and Cluster to look in

.PARAMETER MoRef
The MoRef of the host system

.PARAMETER Cluster
The name of the cluster to do the lookup in

.EXAMPLE
PS F:\> Get-VMHostByMoRef -MoRef HostSystem-host-28 -Cluster MyCluster01

.LINK

http://www.shogan.co.uk

.NOTES
Created by: Sean Duffy
Date: 22/02/2013
#>

[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage="Specify the Host MoRef name you would like to query for it's friendly name.",
ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)][String]$MoRef,[Parameter(Position=1,Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage="Specify the Cluster to search hosts in.",
ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)][String]$Cluster
)

process {

$AllHosts = Get-Cluster $Cluster | Get-VMHost
foreach ($vmhost in $AllHosts)
{

}
$thehost = $AllHosts | Where {$_.ExtensionData.MoRef -match $MoRef} | Select-Object -Property Name

return $thehost

}
}

Here is a quick sample of the output when called directly from the PowerCLI prompt (note the MoRef of “host-22″ used to find the real host name of “esxi02.homelab.local”:

Hopefully this may be of use to some – add it to your PowerCLI script/function toolkit or throw it into your PowerShell $profile for easy access in the future!

I noticed a trend recently on one of our vCenter servers where the disk space on the C:\ drive kept running low. The OS being run is Windows Server 2008 R2. Eventually if the disk fills up, the vCenter service will fail and stop.

I used the free utility “TreeSize” to inspect the drive and see where all the disk space was being used up – the culprit was the C:\ProgramData\VMware\Infrastructure\Inventory Service\Logs\wrapper.log file – sitting at a massive 16GB in my case.

By default this log file seems to be configured to have no limits in size. I am not sure what caused the log file to grow so rapidly over the course of a week or so, but I’m sure closer inspection of the contents of the log file will reveal more detail.

For now, I will just point anyone having a similiar issue to the steps required to enable log rotation and file size limit on this wrapper.log file, which will prevent your vCenter server from running out of disk space. These steps are taken from a VMware KB article, which I will link to below.

High level process is as follows:

• Stop vCenter service
• rename the wrapper.log file to something else (e.g. wrapper.log.bak) – after everything is up and a new log file is in place, this could be compressed and stored away, or deleted
• open up the configuration file at C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Inventory Service\conf and locate the wrapper.conf
• edit the following two lines to change to:
  • wrapper.logfile.maxsize=100m (original value is 0)
  • wrapper.logfile.maxfiles=2 (original value is 0)
• Save the file and close it
• Start the vCenter service again

The actual VMware KB article details the above process.

I have had this issue twice now, where deploying vCD via the Autolab PXE boot option on the vCD VM fails. As far as I can tell, the process seems to fail on the Oracle Express DB installation, due to the RPM not being a valid package.  The vCloud Director steps seem to be the same for Autolab 1.0 or 1.1, so the following applies to both.

error: /root/oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm: not an rpm package (or package manifest)

You can see the error I was getting in the screenshot I captured during boot time below. I had checked the RPM file and everything else to ensure it was in place, and indeed it was. Even vCD installs via the script, although it of course does not work due to the database not being there.

Here is the process I used to correct my vCD install.

• Allow VM to finish booting, even with the missing oracle DB.
• Use PuTTy to SSH to the vCD VM (either direct from your VC or DC VM, or if you have the route setup, from your host machine (in the case you are using VMware Workstation for example). Default credentials are in the Autolab setup guide document
• Open up the “Build” share on the NAS VM, and location the vcd-install script. Default location: \\192.168.199.7\Build\Automate\CentOS\vcd-install (open this with a text editor)
• Locate the method for each section of the install script. There is a section for each process in the script. For each method, copy out the entire block, paste it into a new text document, and remove any exclamation marks from any “echo” parts of the script. I found that manually tracking through this script using PuTTy gave me issues with the exclamation marks being misinterpreted by the shell, so I removed these. You’ll need to get a script block for the following sections and do this:
  • verify() {}
  • installOracle() {}
  • configureOracle() {}
  • generateCertificates() {}
  • installvCD() {}
  • configurevCD() {}
• Remember to copy the whole block, including the start and end braces {} – paste these into a new text document, remove the exclamation marks, then copy-paste them back into your shell open in PuTTy. Hit enter, and the method will be entered and ready for use.
• Once all the methods have  been copied in, you can simply type the name of the method, followed by enter to execute them. By doing it this way, you can manually step through the process and figure out where any potential remaining issues may be. This script is normally executed during the PXE boot installation process so you don’t really get a chance to slowly track through it.
• Type each method in until you reach and complete the last “configurevCD” one
  • verify
  • installOracle
  • configureOracle
  • generateCertificates
  • installvCD
  • configurevCD
• You may find that the generateCertificates and installvCD methods complete and echo out that they had already been completed prior – this is fine.
• After configurevCD finished, all being well, you should now have vCD started, and you should be able to browse over to https://vcd.lab.local and finish the initial configuration via the vCD web page.

Other tips to try would be to:

• MD5 hash check the RPM of the Oracle Express database that you download and place in your Build share – make sure it is not a corrupted file
• Ensure you have the correct version of vCD and the Oracle Express database downloaded

I spent a little bit of time updating my vMetrics plugin for WordPress blogs. To give you a brief run-down, vMetrics allows you to display information from your VMware vCenter Cluster or ESX hosts / lab on your WordPress blog. It works with vSphere 4, 5 and 5.1.

In version 1.1 I have made the following changes:

Change log for version 1.1:

• Added new metrics section for hardware information (Model and Vendor of first host in cluster – this is editable in the PowerCLI script)
• Added configurable widget title section for Hardware
• Updated PowerCLI updater script to have a DO WHILE loop (allowing you to run the script once on a management machine and it will keep updating your blog vMetrics every 30 minutes. (The script is called once every half hour). Thanks @dawoo for the idea
• Added PowerCLI section to send the vendor and model type of the first ESX host it finds back to vMetrics so that you can display this information in the widget too
• Cleaned up PHP in main plugin code

You can take a look at the main plugin page here or use the links below to download the latest version right away. Installation and configuration steps can be found on the main plugin page.

Latest version downloads (get the plugin and updater script):

Download vMetrics Plugin for Wordpress 1.1 (132)
Download vMetrics PowerCLI Updater script 1.1 (141)

A quick post today to just mention that I have updated my ESXi 5.0 / 5.1 Host Backup & Restore GUI utility to version 1.2.

There are a couple of improvements in 1.2 based on feedback received in the comments I have received about the utility. The main improvement introduces a function in the script which backs the GUI to check that ESX hosts are valid before attempting to backup or restore these. You can check the utility out over on it’s page here.

Updates (29-12-2012) – version 1.2:

• Added ESX/ESXi host validation into utility – will now test that the host is valid and either connected or in maintenance mode before attempting backup or restore (See the script’s new “Check-VMHost” function for those interested)
• Minor UI improvements

This is more of a quick tip than the usual full blog posts I do, but a useful one none the less (at least for me). By default when you plug an NTFS (Windows) volume into an Apple Mac, you are able to read the volume, but not write to it. There are ways to forcefully allow NTFS writes, but for those who do not wish to mess with system settings and are using VMware Fusion, this may come in handy.

• Make sure your Windows VM is powered on and booted, then your plug external USB drive with the NTFS formatted volume into Mac
• When prompted, choose to connect the drive to your Windows VM
• Make sure you have a folder from your Mac shared to your Windows VM (e.g. Documents) through Fusion

• Place any files you would like to write to your NTFS volume in your shared folder on your Mac (e.g. Documents folder)
• Using your Windows VM, open explorer, navigate to the shared folder presented to Windows via Fusion, find the files you want to copy, and then copy/paste them to your NTFS volume that has been passed through and mounted on your Windows VM
• As Windows is doing the writing it will of course allow writes to the NTFS volume which has been passed through from the Mac

I am a big advocate of automation and saving time with a good script. Whenever I can find a task that is fairly lengthy, and is likely to be repeated in future, I always consider scripting it. There are many way to configure an ESXi host when it comes to writing build or automation scripts. In fact, I often feel we are quite spoilt for choice. Here are just some of the tools we have available to use:

• PowerCLI
• esxcli
• vMA
• vCLI

I was working on a build configuration script the other day using PowerCLI and found the need to edit some configuration files on the hosts. I wanted to edit the configuration file /etc/vmware/config during the execution of a single PowerCLI script without needing to stop the script or have an additional step to do myself. The following is what I came up with to achieve this:

• Configure host as normal using PowerCLI
• Use PowerCLI to start SSH service on host
• execute plink script to connect to host, run command via SSH, then disconnect
• Use PowerCLI to stop SSH service on host
• Continue with rest of PowerCLI script

Plink is a command line connection tool – essentially a command line version of PuTTy. You can call it from dos prompt and issue it with a single, (or list) of commands to run once connected to a specified host. You can download Plink over here.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at the script as I described above.

# At start of our script we ask for the host's IP or name (this could be automated if you like)
$hostIP = Read-Host "Enter ESX host IP/dns name: "
$vmhost = Get-VMHost $hostIP

# Start the SSH service
$sshService = Get-VmHostService -VMHost $vmhost | Where { $_.Key -eq “TSM-SSH”}
Start-VMHostService -HostService $sshService -Confirm:$false

# Use SSH / plink to configure host with some additional script
cmd /c "plink.exe -ssh -pw HOSTROOTPASSWORD -noagent -m commands.txt root@$hostIP"

# Stop SSH service
Stop-VMHostService -HostService $sshService -Confirm:$false

As you can see, we start off by asking for the host IP or name, this is the only bit of manual input, but even this could be automated. The script then finds the SSH service on the host, and starts it. After this, the script calls the plink.exe file via cmd /c and connects using the root user@ the host’s IP as we entered at the beginning of the script over SSH. Plink is pointed to a commands.txt file (previously placed in the script execution folder), which contains the actual lines of bash script to be executed on the ESXi host via SSH.

Here is the content of the commands.txt file that I refer plink.exe to use (as an example, this bit of script enables copy/paste operations on all VMs running on this host in the guest OS’ console, as per VMware KB 1026437), but could contain any other commands you wish to execute on the ESXi host over SSH.

echo 'isolation.tools.copy.disable="FALSE"' >> /etc/vmware/config
echo 'isolation.tools.paste.disable="FALSE"' >> /etc/vmware/config

* Note two very useful techniques show by Alan in the comments section below, showing how to automatically download plink.exe if it is not available when the script is run, and also how to accept the SSH fingerprint key request by piping Y to plink.exe via the script – check out Alan’s blog post here for more detail.