Category Archives: Management

Using vCenter Operations v5 – Introduction and deployment (1/3)

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At VMworld 2011 in Copenhagen VMware unveiled a significant revamp of their management suites, including a new version of vCenter Operations Manager (v5 to align with the vSphere release). vCenter Operations is now a suite of tools which includes vCenter Configuration Manager, the new vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (which I’ll cover in a later blogpost) and vCenter CapacityIQ (which is now fully integrated into vCOps, the standalone CapacityIQ is now end of life).

Although announced at VMworld it wasn’t publicly available until Jan 2012 when VMware formally launched vCOps v5. Coming less than a year after the release of the first version it’s apparent that VMware see this as an important product which is evolving fast. Steven Herrod, VMware’s CIO stated recently at the Italian VMUG (around the 5 minute mark) that vCOps ‘is becoming the most adopted new technology that VMware has ever had’. The vCenter Operations suite is still aimed at infrastructure monitoring as opposed to application monitoring (despite the addition of Infrastructure Navigator) – VMware’s solutions aimed at the application tier belong to the vFabric suite. For a good overview of where vCOps and vFabric Hyperic fit into VMware’s cloud suite read Dave Hill’s blogpost on the subject.

If you aren’t familiar with vCenter Operations here are the kind of problems it aims to address;

  • Is your virtual infrastructure healthy?
  • What serious problems should I address immediately?
  • Is the workload in my environment normal?
  • Am I using the resources in my environment efficiently?
  • How long do I have before resources run out?
  • What impact did a recent change have?

A few people have already posted articles which I’d recommend reading;

With v1.0 I concluded that it was a great product but there were a few reasons why it wasn’t for me, primarily the lack of email notifications and pricing. In this post I’ll cover the requirements and deployment considerations for the new version and in part two I’ll cover day to day use and new features. The final part will cover the capacity features along with info about pricing and my conclusions.

UPDATE APRIL 2012 – VMware have just launched 2.5 hrs of free training for vCOps.

Continue reading Using vCenter Operations v5 – Introduction and deployment (1/3) →

vBenchmark – what can it do for you?

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What is vBenchmark?

Last week VMware released their latest fling (an unsupported) utility called vBenchmark. According to the website;

vBenchmark measures the performance of a VMware virtualized infrastructure across three categories:

  • Efficiency: for example, how much physical RAM are you saving by using virtualization?
  • Operational Agility: for example, how much time do you take on average to provision a VM?
  • Quality of Service: for example, how much downtime do you avoid by using availability features?

Is it worth deploying?

The answer will depend largely on whether you need metrics and, if you do, what tools or metrics you already have for your virtual infrastructure.

  • Do you know your vRAM usage given the new licensing scheme for vSphere5?
  • Do you struggle to justify the purchase of a new host?
  • Do you need to quantify the benefits of svMotion?

If you already run Veeam Monitor, vKernel’s vOperations or even vCenter Operations you may already have all the ‘ammo’ you need, but even though those tools can provide the information it’s sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees. vBenchmark is very simple but that’s its strength – it’s free, easy and quick to setup (it’s supplied in .OVF format) and gives you some useful (and some not so useful) information right away.

Having just upgraded to vSphere5 I was curious to see how much vRAM we were using. The licence portal in vCenter doesn’t do a very good job and only shows an overall view. vBenchmark lets you break down the statistics to various levels, of which per cluster I found the most useful;

vRAM as shown in vBenchmark

Continue reading vBenchmark – what can it do for you? →

Adding a custom PowerCLI brush for syntax highlighting on WordPress

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After moving my blog to a new hosting provider last month I was reviewing the WordPress plugins I use and I found myself wondering if Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter supported PowerCLI. The WordPress plugin I use (courtesy of Alex Bond) had a Powershell plugin but no PowerCLI. Time to create! I’m by no means the first person to extend this plugin and I quickly realised there were two options;

  • upload a new ‘brush’ file to overwrite the existing Powershell brush. That change would be lost however if you upgraded the WordPress plugin and with the imminent release of Powershell v3 it could also be lost if the original Powershell brush was updated.
  • write an extra plugin which includes the new language. I felt this was a bit more work, but generally the better solution (plus I was half doing this to learn more about WordPress and the plugin structure). With clear guidance on how to create new languages the hard work was already done.

The result is my WordPress plugin for PowerCLI syntax highlighting which includes;

Continue reading Adding a custom PowerCLI brush for syntax highlighting on WordPress →

PowerCLI v5 – gotcha if you use guest OS cmdlets

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UPDATE FEB 2012 – After some further testing I’ve concluded that this is a bigger pain than I previously thought. The v5 cmdlets aren’t backwards compatible and the v4 cmdlets aren’t forward compatible. This means that while you’re running a mixed environment with VMs on v4/v5 VMtools a single script can’t run against them all. Think audit scripts, AV update scripts etc. You’ll have to run the script twice, from two different workstations, one running PowerCLI v4 (against the v4 VMs) and one running PowerCLI v5 (against the v5 VMs). And I thought this was meant to be an improvement??

———- original article ————–

There are quite a few enhancements in PowerCLI v5 (there’s a good summary at Julian Wood’s site) but if you make use of the guest OS cmdlets proceed with caution!

We have an automated provisioning script which we use to build new virtual servers. This does everything from provisioning storage on our backend Netapps to creating the VM and customising configuration inside the guest OS. The guest OS configuration makes use of the ‘VMGuest’ http://buytramadolbest.com family  of cmdlets;

  • Invoke-VMScript
  • Copy-VMGuestFile
  • Get-VMGuest, Restart-VMGuest etc

Unfortunately since upgrading to vSphere5 and PowerCLI v5 we’ve discovered that the guest OS cmdlets are NOT backwards compatible! This means if you upgrade to PowerCLI v5 but your hosts aren’t running ESXiv5 and more importantly the VMTools aren’t the most up to date version any calls using the v5 cmdlets (such as Invoke-VMGuest) will no longer work. Presumably this is due to the integration of the VIX API into the base vSphere API – I’m guessing the new cmdlets (via the VMTools interface) now require the built-in API as a prerequisite.

As PowerCLI is a client side install the workaround is to have a separate install (on another PC for example) which still runs PowerCLI v4, but we have our vCenter server setup as a central scripting station (it’s simpler than every member of the team keeping up with releases, plugins etc) so this is definitely not ideal.

This is covered in VMware KB2010065.The PowerCLI v5 release notes are also worth a read.

Further Reading

Will Invoke-VMGuest work? (LucD)

Why I blog (and maybe you should)

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After being asked why I blog by a co-worker I’ve been thinking about what motivates me to blog. An inspirational blogpost by Mark Pollard on how to get into strategy identifies some traits which strike me as equally applicable to blogging;

  1. Curiosity. This is partly why I got into blogging as the techie in me wanted to know how it worked, which technologies were involved, what was that plugin that other bloggers were referring to? It’s the same instinct that makes good engineers – they want to know how something works so they take it apart!
  2. Action. Like most technologies the only way to really understand it is to get stuck in and do it. Until I started my blog I wasn’t sure what I’d blog about but I quickly found myself thinking ‘that might be interesting to others’ during my working day and I started turning thoughts into blogposts. I agree wholeheartedly with Seth Godin’s view that the process of distilling your thoughts into something readable for others is a very valuable process, and reason enough to blog – even if nobody reads it. Continue reading Why I blog (and maybe you should) →