Last week I had a chance to deploy the latest release of vCenter Log Insight 2.0 (currently in public beta) in my lab to give it a spin. I must say, I am very impressed with the slick new UI and some of the new capabilities like the scale-out and high availability feature.

The actual deployment of the Virtual Appliance is pretty straight forward and the only thing I would mention when selecting the OVF Deployment Size is that the default "Small" option is not the smallest configuration possible. There is actually an "Extra Small" option that can be selected in the drop-down menu which is targeted for POCs and lab evaluations. This will help with minimizing the resource constraints for lab environments.

Something that I am always interested in when evaluating a new solution is to see how easy an automated and unattended configuration is. With the help of some of the Log Insight folks, I was able to create the following shell script which will perform a basic configuration of Log Insight which includes the backend database, admin password and NTP servers:

#!/bin/bash
# William Lam
# www.virtuallyghetto.com

LOG_INSIGHT_ADMIN_PASSWORD=vmware123
LOG_INSIGHT_DB_PASSWORD=vmware123
NTP_SERVERS="0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org"

### DO NOT EDIT BEYOND HERE ###

LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR=/storage/core/loginsight/config
NODE_TOKEN_FILE=node-token
LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_FILE=loginsight-config.xml#1
NODE_UUID=$(uuidgen)

echo "Creating ${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR} .."
[ ! -e ${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR} ] && mkdir -p ${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR}

echo "Generating Log Insight Node UUID ..."
echo ${NODE_UUID} > ${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR}/${NODE_TOKEN_FILE}

echo "Generating Log Insight Configuration file ..."
cat > ${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_DIR}/${LOG_INSIGHT_CONFIG_FILE} << __LOG_INSIGHT__
<config>
<version>
<strata-version value="2.0.1-1734312.UNSTABLE" release-name="Nightly"/>
</version>
<distributed overwrite-children="true">
<daemon port="16520" token="${NODE_UUID}">
<service-group name="standalone"/>
</daemon>
</distributed>
<database>
<password value="${LOG_INSIGHT_DB_PASSWORD}"/>
<port value="12543"/>
</database>
<ntp>
<ntp-servers value="${NTP_SERVERS}"/>
</ntp>
</config>
__LOG_INSIGHT__

echo "Restarting Log Insight ..."
service loginsight restart

echo "Setting Admin password ..."
ADMINPASSWORD=${LOG_INSIGHT_ADMIN_PASSWORD} /opt/vmware/bin/li-reset-admin-passwd.sh

You will need to edit the following variables within the script:

• LOG_INSIGHT_ADMIN_PASSWORD
• LOG_INSIGHT_DB_PASSWORD
• NTP_SERVERS

Here is an example of running the script against a newly deployed Log Insight system:

The above is just an example of what could be automated for Log Insight. If you take a look at the Configuration section of Log Insight, there are many more options.

If you decide you want to automate additional configurations. The way you would accomplish this is to first configure everything from the Log Insight configuration UI. Once you are happy with the configuration, SSH into your Log Insight system. In /storage/core/loginsight/config you will find a couple of configuration files loginsight-config.xml#X with a numeric number at the end. If you take a look at the file with the highest number, it will contain the latest changes to Log Insight and the configurations you made using the UI. You can then take that file and update the script to automate the other configuration options.