Veeam:Nothing to Report!

With money very tight today

And every budget squeezed

How do keep your VMs in shape

And report on them with ease?

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Well luckily for admins all

though desperate it may seem

A free reporting tool is out

From those lovely folks at Veeam

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A windows server is all you need

To get this software live

You will need to run IIS

And dot net three point five ..

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If you don’t have a SQL box

Don’t think you are excluded

It also runs the free edition

And comes with it included

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The reports get even better

With SSRS installed

So when you get in running

Your boss will be enthralled

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Once it’s up and running

You’ll need to get some data

So point it at your vcentre

And come back a bit later

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On your return the screen should show

All kinds of counts and measures

Which you can add to dashboards

And report on at your leisure

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Now while there are restrictions

It’s free now let’s be fair

There is a rolling day of stats

To show what went on where

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Reporting on your vEstate

And linking with Business View

Are easily done in minutes

And it exports to Visio too

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So if you’ve yet to try it out

I really think you oughta

Your admin life will be enriched

By Veeam’s great free reporter

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You can check out Veeam Reporter Free edition by downloading it here.

This post is part of Veeam’s Blogger Contest to get the word out about Veeam Free Reporter 4. I have used the product for about a week now and it is really useful for all kinds of reports on your VM environment. Fellow bloggers have more conventional posts on their impressions of the product so check them out as well. All proceeds of the competition go to charity.

I came, I saw, Ipad

Well I finally relented and bought an iPad … partly because I am currently in Australia and saved the best part of £200 over what I would have paid in the UK, and also because the recent halt on the HP Slate after their acquisition of Palm signalled to me that any viable Windows alternative was now way off.

I am not going to write a mammoth report on it, as people with more time than I have already done so, but in terms of functionality and usability it does not disappoint. The fact my four year old is able to pick it up and use it from scratch is a testament to this.

I didn’t bother with the 3G version as like many others I have a MiFi unit which works very well.

If you are looking at one I would heartily recommend them.

Matt
(Written on an iPad using the WordPress app)

Mac Font Smoothing on Windows

I have never owned a Mac, but from seeing them in use in the past the rendering is definitely easier on the eye that Windows even with ClearType enabled.

I was trying out Safari for Windows the other day and it reminded me of the font difference so I had a quick search for how the rendering was done to see if it could be reproduced. Google soon offered up various suggestions, but the main one was for a little app called GDI++

On the developer’s website is a brief history of the app stating that development had actually ceased but describing its core function:

‘gdi++.dll is a replacement for the Windows default font rasteriser, which gives you a better font smoothing capability, just like Mac OS X. It hacks one of the most important core dlls for graphics, gdi32.dll.’

 

Now fortunately others have continued the app so various improvements have been made – the last version I could find was gdi0870 which I have found to be stable.

Once you have extracted the zip file run the gditray.exe and it will start the app. In the system tray, you will see a little G icon – right click and select Enable. The rendering starts immediately but you may find you have to restart applications or move your mouse over certain areas. If you do want to use the program all the time you can add the program to the Start Menu.

 

The difference is pretty cool:

Before:

After:

 

If you use Chrome you need to tweak the exe to include the –no-sandbox at the end of the shortcut to allow it to render with GDI++

So for those Windows users who fancy a different looking UI, or Mac users who have to spend their working day in front of a PC this may be a nice looking extra for you.

HP SIM and ESXi Hardware Monitoring

With the advent of vSphere my company has been looking at how best to make the move from ESX 3. One obvious path under consideration was to look at migrating to ESXi, both from the perspective of reduced patching (the default view being a lower attack surface with the removal of the Service Console) and the fact that roadmaps have often alluded to it being the final destination for ESX anyway.

With that in mind, I took to having a look at ESX4i in more depth to fathom where it would fit into our environment. We are very much an HP house, housing both standard and blade servers, so one of the core management systems we use is HP Systems Insight Manager. Its primary purpose is hardware monitoring – knowing when the hardware is either failing or failed being a must for our service assurance.

It was therefore a surprise when I first managed to add my test ESXi server to our existing SIM server (version 5.3), that certain components were not showing up. Most concerning was the lack of a disk subsystem. No array information, no disk breakdown – nothing.

Now I don’t know about other companies, but by far the most common failure in a server for us tends to be a disk. Therefore for SIM not to see it appeared somewhat dangerous. Puzzled by this, I investigated further – my first thought was that perhaps it was a GUI issue and that the underlying monitor was present but not displayed.

So I wandered up to the test server in the CER and disengaged one of the drives to see what happened. The HP SIM display did not change – no email alert, no status change on the GUI – even after ten minutes. By contrast the default alerts inside my test vCenter server, which was seeing the entire disk array inside the Hardware Status tab, immediately started sending alerts and changing status on screen.

This was supremely confusing – obviously for the vCenter to be able to detect the disk and any alerts the correct CIM information was being produced on the ESXi host (I was using the correct HP flavour of ESXi) yet SIM was oblivious to a problem.

Sorry to say after some more fiddling with authentication on SIM, trawling through numerous HP forums and even starting a Google Wave on the subject, I had to call it a day and put the ESXi question on ice.

Then back in late March, I saw something on Twitter announcing the release of SIM version 6 – there were various references made to improved support for ESX4 so I was anxious to see if the monitoring components had been upgraded.

So a swift guest build later (SIM 6 supports 64 bit so a Windows 2008 R2 was my choice) I was busy installing the new version. Now SIM is still not that intuitive when it comes to ESXi – it uses WBEM as a method to query the system so the authentication needs to be set there.

Before setting up a discovery job, a change needed to be made to the event filtering. Under Options > Events > Event Filter Options the ‘Accept unregistered events’ needs to be enabled. Don’t ask me why but the HP document suggests it needs to be there for ESXi.

I then set up a discovery job to look for the server (note the port used for access below – you will need to add this under the Advanced protocols credentials > WBEM/WMI tab:

Once this had been saved the job was started– the feedback is vastly improved in version 6, and you see each type of discovery it is trying and whether it is good or bad. The one you are looking for is the WBEM entry.

Once complete I switched to the All Systems view to see if the server had appeared. It had and I was greeted with the following extra display window.

NB. The auto-discovery is also much improved in SIM 6 – if you discover a host it automatically works out what is hosted on it and adds it as well if required. Very nice.

On clicking any of these categories I was pushed to a status window for the host where I was delighted to see the following – noting the comparison between v6 and 5.3 …

SIM 6	SIM 5.3

Success! Full access to the complete hardware layer in ESXi through SIM … looks like we can put ESXi back on the upgrade table

Simple things

VMware has so many new shiny gadgets it is sometimes easy to forget the simplicity it can add to an administrators life. One such example was a few weeks ago.

I was upgrading the memory in a Windows 2000 VM to 8GB, and had to alter the boot.ini to use more than 4GB. Unfortunately I was doing this remotely and during the save process my VPN died. When I rebooted the server I was faced with the dreaded ‘NTBTLDR.EXE is missing’. Now I knew that the problem must lie with the boot.ini, but how to get at it?

Because I was remote I did not have a Windows 2000 disk to get a recovery console up and I needed to get the server up and running again. I then realised that I did not need to boot from a CD to get to the VM’s hard drive.

I shut the VM off again, and jumped on to another server on the same host. In Edit Settings, I simply added the vmdk of the troubled host to the other machine and rescanned for the disk in Disk Management. Lo and behold the disk appeared and I could access the boot.ini file – I had managed to add a space at the beginning of the file during the save process which was causing the problem.

I rectified the file, removed the disk from the spare server and then the vmdk from the client. I crossed my fingers and restarted the VM … and gratefully saw the windows splash screen appear.

If this had been a physical box I would not have had a chance of fixing this remotely, and even on site there would have been much more time expended on finding a chassis with spare slots, array controller configurations etc. so it goes to show even the most basic functions of VMware are worth the effort of putting it in in the first place

A Star Studded VMUG

This Thursday is the first London VMUG of 2010 and it looks like it may well be one of the most popular yet – this is hardly surprising when you see who is going to be in attendance. Based on various tweets etc, the presenters and attendees include no less than 8 of the bloggers on Eric Siebert’s Top Virtualization Bloggers and many more who appear on his Top 100 Twitter List.

Simon Long has created a Linked In Event to see who may be going – if you are going then add your name to the list here:

Based on this and Twitter it looks like the following will be there Thursday:

Alan Renouf

Barry Coombs

Carter Shanklin

Chris Evans

Daniel Eason

Darren Woollard

Jonathan Medd

Michael Poore

Mike Laverick

Ricky El-Qasem

Rob Upham

Simon Gallagher

Simon Long

Simon Seagrave

Stuart Radnidge

Stuart Thompson

Tom Howarth

There will no doubt be others I haven’t seen comment yet that will also be there but it looks to be a really great day.

I will see you all there!

Decoding SSL traffic between a vCentre server and ESX host

I have been battling to try and find out where my HP servers store and provide serial numbers for vCentre in the Hardware Status plugin – to no avail I am sad to say so far. However while investigating I have had to work out how to use Wireshark to decode the SSL traffic between the vCentre and an ESX host, which is very useful for troubleshooting connectivity or other issues between a VC and ESX host, so I thought I would record the process for reference …

For Wireshark (Download the latest version here http://www.wireshark.org/download.html ) to be able to decode the SSL traffic between a VC and host, it needs the private key of the SSL certificate. To get this you will need to copy it from the host via an SCP client ..

The file you are looking for is rui.key and is located in /etc/vmware/ssl folder.

Once you have copied the file to your local machine you can fire up Wireshark and head to the Edit > Preferences.

In there under the Protocols menu on the left hand side, select SSL and you will see the following fields:

The RSA keys list field is where you tell Wireshark to look for the server source i.p. (the ESX host),port,protocol and location of the private key you want to use to decrypt.

In this example I am using the same key to decrypt both standard 443 and 5989 (Secure CIM) traffic – to do more that one you simply use a semi-colon to separate the string:

10.0.0.1,5989,wbem-https,c:\temp\rui.key;10.0.0.1,443,https,c:\temp\rui.key

The SSL debug file field allows Wireshark to write out how it is using the key to aid troubleshooting.

Once you have this you can load up a capture from your vCentre and look for some SSL traffic – you should see in the lower frame something like this:

As you expect the output is unreadable in the standard tab, but if you look at the Decrypted SSL data tab you should see the data magically become a lot more useful:

Wireshark helpfully will now also display a context menu called Follow SSL Stream, once it can decrypt the traffic, and will piece all the traffic it can find back together and pop up a window with the whole transaction in one place.

Once you get into the underlying transactions it is great to see what is going back and forth between the vCentre and hosts – I hope this helps you figure out whatever problem you may be having …

Passed my VCP 4 Exam

I am happy to report I passed my VCP4 exam on Monday – I only completed my VCP3 in October, so thankfully a sizeable amount of the questions were similar. All in all, I found it easier to do the 410 exam ..

For those still studying, I used a variety of bits to revise:

• Simon Long’s Blog – Simon has done most of the hard work for anyone studying for this, including his own hand crafted exams which are great to test yourself on prior to taking your exam. He even breaks down the Exam Blueprint with links to references on each section.
• Scott Lowe’s Mastering VMware vSphere 4 book – it covers a lot of the concepts which will help understand some of the newer things like FT, Direct I/O etc
• VMware Mock Exam on mylearn.vmware.com and obviously all the various documents including Maximum Configurations.
• The great reference cards from Forbes Guthrie at vreference.com.

Good luck for those of you taking your exams before the new year.

Vizioncore vRanger 4.2 released

This is the release vSphere users have been waiting for – 4.2 of vRanger supports the vStorage API and ESXi. I am looking forward to putting the vStorage API through its paces over the next few days.

The release notes are here

Planning … the Liquid way

I have recently had to look at implementing a new project management process into the IT team to cater for an ever increasing demand on our team to deliver projects for various clients. MS Project was in use for certain projects but what was becoming clear was that each member was looking after different projects for different clients. Even if Project was in place for all of these, it was going to be very cumbersome, and would not easily account for our main issue – prioritisation.

Because we have various clients, project requests land at any time – of course these clients do not have any visibility of each others projects so arranging them accordingly becomes a significant task. This is only further complicated by the fact that new and existing projects alter in priority – for us defining and handling this constant shift in workloads was very important.

Having dismissed Project in terms of functionality and cost, I started to investigate some of the online offerings. Having read various reviews and trying some of them out, I eventually came to one that fitted our needs very well.

Liquid Planner ( www.liquidplanner.com ) is an online system that provides some unique project management features. Primarily it requires project work to be estimated rather than exact days or weeks – allowing a gradual scale that shows a much more realistic impression of how and when a project will progress.

As projects are added in you begin to build up a clear picture of what work is being asked for. Now the clever part – imagine one of your clients submits a new request or asks for an existing project to be made the top priority – you simply drag the project up the tree to the top. The system recalculates the new priority item against all the rest and renders an altered plan to show the impact of this change against your whole list. This is fantastic not only to show the client the ramifications of the shift but in assessing the impact to your own team.

 

Another useful feature we will be using heavily is time tracking – any task in a project allows you to click a timer button. You can then carry on with the task until finished – when the time is stopped you can add a note about work carried out relating to the task for future reference. Your time is then clocked into a timesheet to be used for billing purposes if required.

I am not going to try and describe all the components of Liquid Planner – but if you are small team or even an individual contractor the cost is still accessible – yet it can be used to almost any scale if required. In terms of usability I was able to add projects in and start using it almost immediately which is important for adoption within my team. I would recommend watching some of the videos http://www.liquidplanner.com/videos/ as they are short but show off the functionality very well.

I am looking forward to much more organised 2010!

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