Example showing VIBs loaded on a host with a search of the vendor name "VMware"
The other day I was trying to find a list of Custom VIBs (VMware Installation Bundles) that were installed on an ESXi host. The reason was that I just wanted to verify that the VIB had actually installed correctly or not. I threw the query out on Twitter and of course @alanrenouf had a solution in next to no time.
So Alan’s solution is to use the Get-EsxCli cmdlet and specify the host name using the VMHost parameter. After that, he simply uses the code property “software” to gain access to the list of VIBs on the host. E.g.
I have used esxcli on its own before but didn’t realise that PowerCLI had this cmdlet built in to interface with hosts in the same way that esxcli would. This is a great solution and means you can fetch so much more in this regard.
To filter things down a bit more and find the exact match for the Dell OMSA VIB I was looking out for, I used a where clause looking for a match for “dell” on the Vendor property:
$ESXCLI.software.vib.list() | Select AcceptanceLevel,ID,InstallDate,Name,ReleaseDate,Status,Vendor,Version | Where {$_.Vendor -match "dell"}
Thanks again to Alan Renouf for pointing out the use of Get-EsxCli and for providing an example!
In [part 1] of this series of posts, I explored SharpSSH, and how to use this to SSH into network devices via PowerShell or PowerCLI. I found this extremely useful, and managed to automate a process of retrieving some SHA1 SSL fingerprints from a few clusters of ESX hosts in the process. I did however find that loading the dll and functions necessary to get this bit of automation done was a little tedious. I had heard about wodSSH via the get-scripting podcast and decided I would need to take a look at this.
If you are planning on using wodSSH, you should start by downloading it here. Note that you should definitely buy a license if you are going to be using this for your job or day to day automation – the license is not to expensive if you consider the kinds of automation you could achieve with this! For this blog post I am just using the trial version in my lab environment at home to try out – the trial pops up a “nag screen” every now and then to indicate you are unlicensed. Once downloaded, install wodSSH and the libraries will now be available for use on your machine.
Download the script below, or take a look at it in the Syntax Highlighted area below – this is an example of how I was able to SSH into a cluster of ESXi hosts and run a remote command via SSH through PowerCLI. In this example, a table is returned with Host names, along with their SHA1 fingerprint information. It is possible to retrieve this info (as of ESXi 5 I believe) in PowerCLI, but for this example I just wanted to demonstrate the use of SSH and PowerShell / PowerCLI.
You will notice that on line 09, we load the wodSSH library using the New-Object cmdlet. After this we continue to setup some properties for our $ssh connection object. A regex check is used to determine when are connected to a host and have an SSH shell prompt ($ssh.WaitFor(“regex:[$%>;] $”). We then use $cmdresult to capture the result of running an SSH command via our connection to our current ESXi host. To finish capturing the output of the command on our remote host, we use a regex check again (“regex:[~#]”). You’ll notice that the actual command is also on this line, i.e. line 18 (openssl). After the result is captured, we disconnect our SSH session, then proceed to build our small report array. At the end of the script, we output the $Report array to the screen.
Results of the above script in PowerCLI
As far as I can see, the wodSSH library can open up a whole new world of automation for you in the data centre. Think of the possibilities – you could automate just about everything, from switches, routers, Linux/Unix hosts / ESXi Hosts to iLO / DRAC and other management cards. Essentially, anything that accepts commands via SSH! If you have any automation stories using wodSSH, or just PowerShell or PowerCLI in general, I would love to hear about them – so feel free to drop a comment or two on this post.
Charts are awesome – they can help make sense of endless reams of text and data and they generally look pretty. So my question to myself was: “How do I get useful data I generate using PowerCLI into a nice, neat little chart?” I had a quick google and found a couple of different solutions. The one that stood out as being the easiest to start off with for me was to use the “Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5”
I read a few blog posts around detailing how to create these custom .NET charts in PowerShell, but this tends to be quite a tedious process – akin to creating a Windows Forms GUI in PowerShell manually – basically a complete pain. The blog posts I read definitely helped me understand how to create charts and soon I was able to generate some pretty cool charts based off data from PowerCLI (or PowerShell) data. I wanted to ultimately automate the creation of Charts for my PowerCLI and PowerShell scripts, so I decided to create myself a Function that could be used anywhere to generate a Bar or Pie Chart on the fly.
httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=EvQ2znWr0lk
Enter Create-Chart. This is the Function I have made that accepts a bunch of Parameters to create a custom Chart and outputs this to a .PNG file. The data needs to be fed in to the function via a Hash Table (this could be changed) so I also created a “helper” Function called Create-HashTable which also does the work of generating a hash table for use with the Create-Chart Function. You could of course also just feed the Create-Chart function with a manually created HashTable too – this is useful to know because my Create-HashTable function is fairly basic and is not too flexible. Here are a couple of examples of Charts I created using these Functions:
Pie Chart of VMs and their configured Memory Resource settingsThe same data but now in a Bar chartHost Chart created with a manually created Hash Table (Name and MemoryUsageMB Properties)
Download the two functions below to give them a try! Please do suggest any improvements – my parameter handling on the Create-Chart script needs work – they are not specified as mandatory, although all parameters are mandatory – I couldn’t get the Function to work correctly when I did make them mandatory. The Create-HashTable function could also be improved in that at the moment you can only specify Cmdlets for the “Cmdlet” parameter that do not have any double quotation marks inside the cmdlet or any $_ variables. This is because of the way I am using the Invoke-Expression cmdlet inside the function. A simple cmdlet parameter such as “Get-VM | Select Name, MemoryMB” would work just fine for example. Remember that the Create-Chart function needs to be fed with a Hash Table. This could be generated yourself, or by using the Create-HashTable function below. Here are the downloads:
Don’t forget the Microsoft Chart Controls – a requirement to run these functions
Download the functions here:
Create-Chart -ChartType Bar -ChartTitle "Custom Chart" -FileName seanchart5 -XAxisName "My Objects" -YAxisName "My Object Values" -ChartWidth 750 -ChartHeight 650 -DataHashTable $HashTable
So there you have it – a fairly easy way to Chart the data you can get from your PowerCLI or PowerShell cmdlets! I wrote these Functions as part of a larger report that I am working on for another soon to come blog post! As I mentioned above, there is plenty of room for improvement – so if you do make any improvements or changes, please be sure to post them in the comments section.
To check that your VMs have loaded and are running the VMware Memory Balloon driver in the guest OS, you can use esxtop.
Connect to your ESXi host using vMA, the DCUI or PuTTy (needs SSH service running) and run esxtop.
Switch to the Memory page (press M)
Press F to add a field
Press J to add the field “MCTL = MEM Ctl (MB)”
Press space to return to the main memory view page of esxtop.
In the new MCTL? column, look at the list of VMs – a “Y” means that the driver is loaded and running whereas a “N” means that the balloon driver is not present.
This can be useful to double check things if you run into a problem troubleshooting memory ballooning issues as I have seen cases where VMware Tools reports as “OK” for the VM but the balloon driver is not running when viewed in esxtop.
Trying to apply a Host profile created from another Host in a cluster today I got an error message which resulted in only some of the host profile actually being applied.
A specifed parameter was not correct. changedValue.key
Error message received after trying to apply profile to Host
I thought that the error message looked familiar, but couldn’t quite remember at the time, so I left what I was doing to take a look at again later. On my way home this evening I had a bit of a brainwave – the ESX host I had taken the original profile from was a slightly different update level (2) as opposed to the update level of the newer host I was applying the profile to. I also remembered where I had seen the text “changedValue.key” in the error message before – changing Advanced Settings on a Host using PowerCLI! This gave me a good idea as to where to look for the issue I was having with this Host Profile – the Advanced Settings in the Host Profile.
I knew it was probably to do with a value that was different between hosts because of their differing update levels, but to gather more information I decided to hit the log files to find out more… Opening up /var/log/vmware/hostd.log on the Host and navigating down to the time I tried to apply the Host Profile I found this (interesting bit in the screenshot below, full log text in the section after that):
Interesting bits of information that help point to the issue in hostd.log
[2012-02-20 19:50:07.849 F66966D0 info 'TaskManager'] Task Created : haTask-ha-host-vim.option.OptionManager.updateValues-896
[2012-02-20 19:50:07.853 F66966D0 verbose 'VersionOptionProvider'] Attempt to set readonly option
[2012-02-20 19:50:07.853 F66966D0 info 'App'] AdapterServer caught exception: vmodl.fault.InvalidArgument
[2012-02-20 19:50:07.853 F66966D0 info 'TaskManager'] Task Completed : haTask-ha-host-vim.option.OptionManager.updateValues-896 Status error
[2012-02-20 19:50:07.853 F66966D0 info 'Vmomi'] Activation [N5Vmomi10ActivationE:0x5cf27a98] : Invoke done [updateValues] on [vim.option.OptionManager:ha-adv-options]
[2012-02-20 19:50:07.853 F66966D0 verbose 'Vmomi'] Arg changedValue:
(vim.option.OptionValue) [
(vim.option.OptionValue) {
dynamicType = <unset>,
key = "Misc.HostAgentUpdateLevel",
value = "2",
},
(vim.option.OptionValue) {
dynamicType = <unset>,
key = "Misc.HostAgentUpdateLevel",
value = "2",
}
]
[2012-02-20 19:50:07.853 F66966D0 info 'Vmomi'] Throw vmodl.fault.InvalidArgument
[2012-02-20 19:50:07.853 F66966D0 info 'Vmomi'] Result:
(vmodl.fault.InvalidArgument) {
dynamicType = <unset>,
faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null,
invalidProperty = "changedValue.key",
msg = "",
}
[root@hostnamehere vmware]#
The cause:
So we can see that the Host Profile did a “change value” (changedValue) on the key “Misc.HostAgentUpdateLevel” and this is where our error was thrown with an “invalidProperty” (changedValue.key). If we google the message “vmodl.fault.InvalidArgument” we’ll arrive at the VMware SDK Reference Guide which states that “An InvalidArgument exception is thrown if the set of arguments passed to the function is not specified correctly.” In this case we’ll soon see that this is happening because the value that is trying to be changed is actually a read-only value for the Host – as it should be, as it just references the update level of the host – this wouldn’t normally be something you want to change.
The issue here was of course that original host off which the profile was based is update 2, whereas the new host having the profile applied is update 4. The two settings differ, therefore Host Profiles tries to change this value on the new Host. The setting is really read-only, therefore Host Profiles fails to apply the value and throws this error message at us, which also results in the rest of our host profile (annoyingly) not being applied. Ideally if Host Profiles found a read-only value that shouldn’t be changed, it would not change this value.
Solution:
So the simple solution is to either:
Take a Host Profile from a Host with the settings you need which is on the same update level as the Hosts you will be applying this profile to.
Modify this Host Profile (edit) and remove the Advanced Setting for “Misc.HostAgentUpdateLevel“.
In my case, I was testing the host profile on a clean ESX Host before using it for other Hosts – that meant I also only had one new ESX host of this particular update level and therefore couldn’t use the first option (take the profile from an existing host). So I therefore just went to Home -> Host Profiles and edited this Host Profile to get rid of the unnecessary key called “Misc.HostAgentUpdateLevel” like so:
Remove the two entries for "Misc.HostAgentUpdateLevel" from the Host Profile
After removing the entries referring to this read-only key, I simply re-applied the profile and this time around all the settings went on as expected and there was no more error message. So to sum it all up, check that you aren’t first of all taking a Host Profile from a reference host of a different update level as your target hosts (and if you have to you can then resort to manually editing your profile as I did). If you get cryptic errors applying your Host Profiles, check your Host log files for more info and clues as to where the issue may lie.
