ESXi – Page 141

Other handy vSphere VOBs for creating vCenter Alarms

04.24.2014 by William Lam // 8 Comments

Lately I have been writing on a variety of topics regarding the use of VOBs (VMkernel Observations) for creating useful vCenter Alarms such as:

I figure it would also be useful to collect a list of all the vSphere VOBs, at least from what I can gather by looking at /usr/lib/vmware/hostd/extensions/hostdiag/locale/en/event.vmsg on the latest version of ESXi. The list below is quite extensive, there are a total of 308 vSphere VOBs not including the VSAN VOBs in my previous articles. For those those of you who use vSphere Replication, you may also find a couple of handy ones in the list.

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How to create vCenter Alarm to alert on ESXi 5.5u1 NFS APD issue?

04.19.2014 by William Lam // 14 Comments

As some of you may have heard, there is currently a known issue with NFS based datastores (includes VSA NFS datastores) after upgrading to vSphere 5.5 Update 1. The issue causes NFS datastores to disconnect and go into an APD (All Paths Down) state. VMware is currently aware of the problem and you can follow KB 2076392 for the latest updates.

While going through my Twitter stream this morning, I noticed an interesting question from fellow Blogger and friend Jase McCarty who asked the following:

I was quite surprised to hear that there were no vCenter Alarms being triggered for this issue. I decided to take a look at the KB to better understand the symptoms and see if there was anything I could do to help. From what I can tell, the only way to identify this particular problem is by looking at the logs which the KB has an example of what you would see.

Once I took a look at the logs, I knew there was at least two methods in which one could get alerts. One option would be to leverage vCenter Log Insight and create a query based on the particular string but no every customer is using Log Insight and it does require a bit of setup. The second more obvious option for me would be to key off of the VMkernel VOBs that are being generated which I have written about in the past for detecting duplicate IP Addresses for ESXi and VSAN component threshold count.

Here are the steps to create vCenter Alarm:

Step 1 - Create a new vCenter Alarm and give it a name. Select "Hosts" for Monitor and "Specific event occurring ..." for Monitor for

Step 2 - For the Trigger, you will add the following VOB entries (just copy/paste them in)

esx.problem.storage.apd.start
esx.problem.vmfs.nfs.server.disconnect
esx.problem.storage.apd.timeout

Note: The alarm will activate if ANY of the VOBs are seen since it is an OR statement. It would have been nice to be able to group these together to generate the alarm

Once the alarm has been created, you will at least have a way to get notified if you are potentially affected by this problem. I would still highly recommend you subscribe to KB 2076392 for all the latest updates.

Running Nested Xen Hypervisor with VMware Tools on ESXi

04.04.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

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?

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:

If you are interested in setting this up, here are the high level steps:

Install latest CentOS which is 6.5 using either the full ISO installer or netinstall which is what I prefer to use
Install Xen per the Wiki
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 😉