How-tos

Setting up vCenter 5.0.x Inventory Service wrapper.log rotation

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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.

 

Troubleshooting the Autolab vCloud Director 1.5.1 installation

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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

 

Writing files to an NTFS volume in OSX using VMware Fusion

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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

 

Using plink to modify ESXi host configuration files via SSH from a PowerCLI script

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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.

Issue using the Count method to count objects with PowerShell 2.0

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I came across a small issue with a little helper script I wrote to count vSphere objects using PowerCLI this morning. It’s been a couple of a weeks since I last did a blog post – things have been very busy, so I have not been able to commit much time over the last few weeks to blogging. As such, I thought I would do a quick post around this small issue I came across earlier. It has more than likely been covered off elsewhere, but will be a good reference point to come back to if I ever forget!

 

So to the issue I saw. Essentially, if an object count is 1 or less, then the object is returned as the object type itself. For example, where only one Distributed Virtual Switch exists in a vSphere environment, and we use the cmdlet, Get-VirtualSwitch -Distributed, a single object is returned of BaseType “VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Impl.V1.VIObjectImpl“.

 

However, if we had more than one dvSwitch, then we would get a BaseType of “System.Array” returned.

 

We are able to use the Count() method on an array with PowerShell version 2.0, but are not able to use the Count() method on a single object. The work around I found here (when using PowerShell 2.0) is to cast the object type specifically as an array.

So in the case of our dvSwitch example above, originally we would have done:

@dvSwitchCount = (Get-VirtualSwitch -Distributed).Count

 

To cast this as an array, and therefore having an accurate count of the objects, whether there are no members, one member, or more, we would use:

@dvSwitchCount = @(Get-VirtualSwitch -Distributed).Count

 

Note the addition of the “@” sign – used to cast the variable as an array.

Jonathan Medd also kindly pointed out that this is fixed with PowerShell 3.0 – have a read of the new features to see the addition that allows .Count to be used on any type of object over here.