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VSAN vCheck Plugins

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After creating my VSAN Configuration Maximum query script I thought it would also be useful to create an equivalent set of VSAN vCheck Plugins. For those of you who have not heard of or used vCheck (pretty rare unless you do not use PowerShell/PowerCLI in your environment), it is a PowerShell reporting HTML framework created by Alan Renouf. vCheck allows you to schedule a series of PowerCLI scripts/checks against your vSphere environment and produces a daily report on the things you care most about such as datastore capacity being under a certain threshold or potential snapshots growing out of control in your environment.

Given this is the primary use case for vCheck, I figure it would make sense to implement these same set of VSAN configuration maximum checks in vCheck as well. This would also give me the opportunity to learn more about vCheck as I have never used it before. If you are new to vCheck, I highly recommend you check out Jonathan Medd's article on how to get started with vCheck here.

Here is a sample report of a real VSAN environment to get an idea of what the report could look like: VSAN-vCheck-Report.html

Below are the VSAN vCheck Plugins that I have created which also includes a bonus plugin which reports on the capacity of a VSAN Datastore. You can pick and choose the VSAN plugins that you want to use in your environment and then customize the threshold parameter for each report based on your requirements.

  1. 990 VSAN Capacity Report.ps1
  2. 991 VSAN Configuration Maximum Disk Group Per Host Report.ps1
  3. 992 VSAN Configuration Maximum Magnetic Disks Per Disk Group Report.ps1
  4. 993 VSAN Configuration Maximum Total Magnetic Disks In All Disk Groups Per Host Report.ps1
  5. 994 VSAN Configuration Maximum Component Per Host Report.ps1
  6. 995 VSAN Configuration Maximum Hosts Per Cluster Report.ps1
  7. 996 VSAN Configuration Maximum VMs Per Host Report.ps1
  8. 997 VSAN Configuration Maximum VMs Per Cluster Report.ps1

For those of you who are looking to evaluate VSAN in their environment, hopefully these VSAN vCheck reports will come in handy. If there are others that you feel that might be useful, feel free to leave a comment or contribute back to the vCheck project on Github.

VMware 2014 Cycling Kit (10 Days left to order)

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I know a few of you were interested in the VMware 2013 Cycling Kit that I had purchased last year and have asked when the next kit would be available for purchase. Historically, this has been an internal community led project by Scott Jobe who volunteers his own time to run this program. Given the amount of interests outside of VMware, I thought I would ask Scott if it would be okay to share this externally for other fellow cycling and VMware enthusiasts.

Screen Shot 2014-04-07 at 7.59.42 AMIf you are potentially interested in making a purchase, the process is broken down into two steps as listed below. Please carefully read through the FAQ before submitting an order. I would also like to reiterate that there is only 10 days left on the order. I apologize for not being able to share this sooner. I am pretty excited for this years kit as it will be VMware's first white kit ever!

Step 1 - Follow link provided and place items in your cart (Do not try to pay for them at this time).  Don't forget to create an account.  See FAQ for more details.

Step 2 - Once we have Step 1 complete (due by April, 16) we will briefly close the order, perform some maintenance, then re-open it so that you can pay for your items.  The window for payments will be much shorter so please do this as quickly as you can after we notify you its time to pay.

You can find more details in the FAQ here VMware_Cycling_Apparel_FAQ_2014 and please make sure you read through it carefully before putting in your order.

Here is the link for the VMware 2014 Cycling Kit: https://www.lgpickpayride.com/VMware_2014_Clothing_Order

Running Nested Xen Hypervisor with VMware Tools on ESXi

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I recently saw an interesting tweet from former VMware colleague Steve Muir who use to run our VMware Academic Program (VMAP). From the looks of things, Steve has been exploring the virtual rabbit hole by performing some cool multi-level vInception by running Xen in a Nested ESXi Virtual Machine running on top of VMware Fusion 🙂 I wonder if he has tried to run a VM in the Xen instance yet?

xen-vmware-tools-nested-4
Anyway, the thing that caught my eye was not the fact that you could run a Xen Hypervisor within ESXi, this has actually been done before in the past. What was interesting to me was the fact that he could not get VMware Tools to show up when Xen is installed and running. I was actually curious to see why this was the case and while waiting for some of my physical hosts to finish rebooting, I figure I give this a go myself. I was leveraging the Wiki page that Steve had initially provided but that gave me some issues as Xen would kernel panic upon a reboot.

In talking to Steve about this, he provided me with another link to a QuickStart guide for Xen which simplifies the setup and I was able to finally get it booted up (definitely not as easy as an ESXi install) . Afterwards, I just installed VMware Tools as I normally would and you can even use this one-liner script here that will automate the installation:

Funny enough, just by using this latest guide for the Xen installation, I was able to get VMware Tools to show up in the vSphere Web/C# Client without any additional tweaks. Here is a screenshot to prove this works:

xen-vmware-tools-nested-1
If you are interested in setting this up, here are the high level steps:

  1. Install latest CentOS which is 6.5 using either the full ISO installer or netinstall which is what I prefer to use
  2. Install Xen per the Wiki
  3. Install VMware Toosl (this step can be swapped with Step 2 if you, it works either way)

Thanks Steve for sharing your notes on getting Xen running on ESXi and I guess you ended up getting an answer to your question 😉