WilliamLam.com

Ghetto Groups

by // 1 Comment

Back in December, VMware upgraded their VMTN (VMware Technology Network) forum software Jive and introduced a completely new layout of the forums that would hopefully enhance the user experience. Though it brought many new features, it also brought on several new issues. The one bug that affected me was the incorrect conversion of the ghettoVCB document, because the conversion was unsuccessful it was decided to be left alone until the issue could be resolved. If you visited the document, it would display a "Forbidden" error message. Unfortunately due to the time it took to resolve, even Google cache started to get stale and stopped serving the cached contents.

Luckily, with the help of Alex Maier (VMTN Community Manager) and her team, she was able to get the ball rolling and got the fix tested and rolled out to production. The ghettoVCB document is once again alive and hopefully in no time it will be returned as the first search result on various search engines.

Going through the pain of receiving dozen of emails, private messages, tweets, etc. per week regarding the issue, I came to realize that VMTN document itself was not the right medium to host both content and user discussions. As it stands today, there are over 1,100+ comments which is pretty significant and managing and keeping up with the conversations is a pretty daunting task. I enjoy the feedback that community provides and the collaboration that takes place and I realize that this can be solved by using the new Groups feature.

To be honest, I did not spend much time looking at Groups when the VMTN software was upgraded, but now that the ghettoVCB document has been fixed, I realized this would fit this need perfectly. With the help of categories users can now post their feedback, discussions/issues and feature request and it can be easier consumed by both new users and myself. Starting today, I will have the following groups based on the top 5 most popular and active scripts:

I have also disabled any new comments on these VMTN documents and will ask that all new comments be re-directed to respective VMware Groups. I'm currently working with Alex to see if there is an easy way to convert the existing comments into a document and attached that as a download to help minimize the complexity of the document. In the worse case, the comments will be left alone as read-only as I think the discussion that currently exists are invaluable. All other VMTN documents that I maintain in the vGhetto Repository will continue to use comments and depending on how well the groups go, I may migrate those over as well.

I hope these new groups will be beneficial for everyone and I am looking forward to the collaboration. Thanks for your support and please help spread the word!

How to extract host information from within a VM?

by // 34 Comments

From time to time, I see this question come up asking how one might be able to extract a certain piece of information from either ESX(i) or the management APIs (vSphere API) from within a virtual machine. The simple answer is you can not, by default the guest operating system has no idea of the underlying hypervisor nor does it have the access to the management APIs. This of course, assumes you are following VMware's best practices in isolated and segregating off your management network from your virtual machine network.

Having said that, there are certain bits of information that you can extract about your ESX(i) host from within the guestOS using some of the utilities that is installed with VMware Tools. The first utility is called VMware Toolbox command which can be found on both UNIX/Linux and Windows systems that have tools installed.

[Read more...]

Ghetto Reflections 2010

by // 1 Comment

Looking back on 2010, it is hard to believe that virtuallyGhetto was created only 7 months ago. Instead of writing a long post, we thought we would share with you some of the highlights and favorite blog posts/scripts of 2010:

Here were the highlights for virtuallyGhetto in 2010:
May 31st - virtuallyGhetto says hello to the blogosphere
June 25th - virtuallyGhetto is part of the esteemed VMware Planet v12n feed
Sept 27th - virtuallyGhetto made the Top 25 VMware Bloggers List
Nov 19th - Veeam becomes first sponsor for virtuallyGhetto

Here were the top 10 blog posts of 2010 by page views:
Automating ESXi 4.1 Kickstart Tips & Tricks 9,914
ESXi 4.1 - Major Security Issue 4,564
Getting started with vMA 2,976
What is VMware vsish? 2,768
1200+ undocumented .vmx parameters 1,660
Automating vCloud Director and Oracle DB Installation 1,283
Script: Updated ghettoVCB and ghettoVCBg2 to Support vSphere 4.1 1,279
vMA 4.1 - Active Directory IntegrationTip 1,240
How to inject custom drivers into an ESXi 4.1 image using vibddi? 1,239
How to configure and use vMA's vi-fastpass with fpauth and adauth on vSphere 4.1 1,121

 

Here were the top 10 ghetto scripts of 2010 by page views:
ghettoVCB.sh 367,905
ghettoVCBg2.pl 66,683
vmwarevSphereHealthCheck.pl 62,861
ghettoShutdown.pl/upsVIShutdown.pl (DEPRECATED) 48,693
vmwareHealthCheck.pl 36,969
ghettoVCB-restore.sh 30,583
ghetto-esxi-linked-clones.sh 12,227
ghettoUPSHostShutdown.pl 7,820
vmwarevSphereSecurityHardeningReportCheck.pl 5,356
ghettoHostBackupManagement.pl 4,723

*Note: You may have noticed that the ghettoVCB VMTN document is currently inaccessible (displays "Forbidden" error). This is a known issue that was caused by the recent VMTN community upgrade by VMware. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and we are hoping the issue will get resolved when VMware resumes after the holiday period. In the meanwhile, you can access the document via Google cache for the latest version of the script*

We also want to take this moment to thank our readers and the virtualization community for the support that you guys have given us through the comments on the blog, VMTN, linkage, twitter re-tweets, etc. There are two individuals that I would like to personally thank: Duncan Epping who has encouraged me on numerous occasions to start my own blog. In the end, it was the passion and dedication that Duncan put into his own blog to share with the community that really inspired me to start virtuallyGhetto. I would also like to thank Chris Wolf, who has been one of our first avid supporters of ghettoVCB and even today, he is still one of our largest advocate, providing honorable mentions even in his VMworld presentations!

We look forward to 2011 and hope to continue to provide great content and scripts to the VMware and virtualization community. We wish you happy holidays and a great New Year! See you all in 2011!