William Lam

Presenting at VMworld Developers Day 2010

07.28.2010 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

If you are attending VMworld Developers Day 2010, come by and check out the presentation I will be giving alongside the security and virtualization expert, Edward Haletky.

Our presentation is entitled: vGhetto - Communities Building Great Solutions (PPC-07)

Level: Advanced

Description: The vSphere APIs offer a very rich interface allowing developers and administrators to create any number of scripts and tools to aid in the management of their VMware environment. We will present to you how the vGhetto Scripts and Client were created using vSphere API in a platform agnostic manner. The vGhetto Client is a multi platform user interface for running tasks that previously could only be run from a command line. We will also show you how to implement the vGhetto Scripts on various platforms that includes Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX including a few live demonstrations. While we have chosen the vSphere SDK for Perl, all other SDKs (PowerCLI, VI Java, etc.) can also work in creation of an invaluable set of tools targeted at a developer or administrator.

Speaker: William Lam, Edward Haletky

If you are interested in automation and want to learn how the vGhetto Scripts can help you administer and manage your VMware environment. We will also be giving a cool demo of the vGhetto Client, you won't want to miss this session. Hope to you see you here!

For more details on this and other sessions at VMworld Developers Day 2010, check out this blog post here.

I would also like to mentioned that Wil Van Antwerpen, who is not listed in the abstract, is also a key member in the vGhetto Open Source Project. Unfortunately, Wil will not be joining us at VMworld this year.

vSphere 4.1 Is the Gift That Keeps On Giving

07.23.2010 by William Lam // 3 Comments

While doing some testing on ghettoVCB earlier this week, I noticed a new command line argument to vmkfstools utility called "--fix" in vSphere 4.1. From the man pages for vmkfstool, it states the following:

-x, --fix -[check|repair]
This option will check and/or repair the virtual disk in case of an unclean shutdown.

Here is an example of running the command against a VM's VMDK:

[root@esx4-1 ~]# vmkfstools --fix check /vmfs/volumes/esx4-1-local-storage-1/dummy/dummy.vmdk
Disk is error free

What surprised me next while looking up this new parameter in the man pages, I discovered another new argument called "--miscop":

-J, --miscop [setuuid | getuuid]
Â´setuuidÂ´ option creates a unique identifier (UUID) for the
virtual disk and stores the UUID in the descriptor file of the
virtual disk. If the descriptor file already contains a UUID,
it will be overwritten with a new one. Please make sure that the
virtual disk does not have a UUID before using this option.
Â´getuuidÂ´ option displays the UUID of the virtual disk.

The "--miscop" command is listed in the man pages but is not displayed when running "vmkfstools --help".

At this point, I thought there might be more hidden commands that VMware is holding out on us. I decided to use a well known UNIX/Linux utility called "strings" which looks for printable string in files and apply that to the vmkfstools binary. After sifting through the massive output, I found the following additional command line parameters that are not documented:

dumpfs
numfiles
force
recursivelock
recover
vmfsscan
physicalmapping
logicalmapping
allocateblock
clearlazyzero
parseimage
createarro
createmirrordisks
createmultiextent
trackvdisk
activehosts

Here are some of the command syntax which I have been able to verify:

dumpfs can be used by specifying either "-D | --dumpfs" and specifying a VMFS volume, file or folder.

[root@esx4-1 ~]# vmkfstools -D /vmfs/volumes/esx4-1-local-storage-1/

Lock [type 10c00001 offset 4292608 v 33, hb offset 3440640
gen 11, mode 0, owner 00000000-00000000-0000-000000000000 mtime 2509]
Addr <4, 0, 0>, gen 1, links 4, type dir, flags 0, uid 0, gid 0, mode 1755
len 1260, nb 1 tbz 0, cow 0, zla 1, bs 1048576

[root@esx4-1 ~]# vmkfstools --dumpfs /vmfs/volumes/esx4-1-local-storage-1/

[root@esx4-1 ~]# vmkfstools --activehosts /vmfs/volumes/esx4-1-local-storage-1/
Found 1 actively heartbeating hosts on volume '/vmfs/volumes/esx4-1-local-storage-1/'
(1): MAC address 00:50:56:92:3f:86

For the other parameters, I have not been able to figure out the additional arguments to make them work. If anyone or VMware has further insight into these other options, I would love to know what they are used for.

Magikmon MKBackup for ghettoVCB

07.22.2010 by William Lam // 1 Comment

I was contacted awhile back ago by Alain Spineux, about his MKBackup utility and he was in the very early stages of integrating the software with my ghettoVCB script. Per Alain's website:

MKBackup is a free front-end for common backup tools like MS Windows ntbackup, and it successor wbadmin, Un*x tools like tar, but also popular ghettoVCB to backup Virtual Machine on VMware ESX(i) host.

MKBackup is developed in Python and is available for Microsoft Windows, for Linux and other Un*x systems.

MKBackup is driven by a CLI and jobs are defined in an INI file. Its main feature is to send an email report including log files and all hints that could help the user to estimate the real status of the backup.

It looks like Alain has done some more work and the recently released version 0.9.3. You can get a better overview of the tool at his website and there is also a dedicated support forum.

I have personally not used MKBackup, but it could be very useful and compliment ghettoVCB. Not only can you schedule backups on a Windows or UNIX/Linux host using MKBackup, but it also generates backup reports based on the output from ghettoVCB logs. The reports can then be monitored using a soon to be released utility called MagiKmon which can provide email alerts on successful or failed backups.

Here are a few screenshots that Alain has kindly provided with the use of the latest version of ghettoVCB: