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Quick Tip - How to quickly find the release & build number on VCSA

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I have been spending quite a bit of time in the lab lately (researching, prototyping, breaking things, etc.) and one of the challenges I have is figuring out which environment I am actually logged into. I literally have a dozen VCSA (vCenter Server Appliances) deployed for various testing and I always forget the build and release the system I am currently logged into. A quick way to get this information on your VCSA is to run the following command:

vpxd -v

Note: There is also vpxd.exe for vCenter Server running on Windows which you can also use.

I also noticed in the VCSA 5.1 it used to provide the vCenter Server build and release number when SSH into the host but it looks like this has now changed with the VCSA 5.5 release. I suspect this might be related to some of the security hardening that has been done by VMware on our appliances (which is great) and I assume there maybe an issue by providing the build and version info as part of the SSH banner.

If you wish to re-enable this feature, you can just edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config and specify the banner to point to /etc/ssh/banner which will includes both the release and build information. In any case, if you are in a pinch and need to quickly figure out the version, you can use the command above.

Early Xmas gift from VMware - pyVmomi (vSphere SDK for Python)

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For vSphere customers and partners who use the Python programming/scripting language, Christmas may have just arrived early. I just found today, VMware has published an initial release of their vSphere SDK for Python called pyVmomi on Github this past weekend. A Python-based SDK has always been a very popular feature request among customers and partners that I have spoken with in the past. It looks like VMware Engineering has heard you loud and clear and have been working hard to get this released.

pyVmomi Github Repository:
https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi

pyVmomi Pypi package:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyvmomi

One of the nice things about releasing pyVmomi on Github versus trying to package it with a particular vSphere release is that the larger VMware community can contribute to the project as well as more frequent updates from VMware. This has also been quite successful for another popular VMware SDK called rbvmomi (vSphere SDK for Ruby) which is seeing a huge uptick with RVC (Ruby vSphere Console) which is built on top of rbvmomi and is a great tool for managing and troubleshooting VMware VSAN.

In this first release, you will notice there is a limited amount documentation and samples exercising the various capabilities of vSphere and you will see further enhancements in these areas with future updates. If there are specific things you would like to see or samples that you think would be useful to have or that you have built, feel free to file an issue or send pull requests to the pyVmomi Github.

If you wish to quickly get started, you can install pyVmomi using a variety of methods including pip, easy_install and pypi package. Below are the steps I took to install pyVmomi on my Mac OS X system using pip and git.

Step 1 - Install pyVmomi using pip by running the following command:

sudo pip install pyvmomi

Step 2 - Clone the pyVmomi Github repo to your system using Git by running the following command:

git clone https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi.git

After the above command, you will have a folder called pyVmomi which contains the source code as well as the two sample scripts. You can contribute back if you create additional samples or enhancements to pyVmomi by simply sending a pull requests.

Try the getallvms.py sample run the following command:

python sample/getallvms.py --host mini.primp-industries.com --password [PASS]

To try the poweronvm.py sample run the following command:

python sample/poweronvm.py --host mini.primp-industries.com --password [PASS] --vmname [VM]

Hopefully we will see many more samples from VMware as well as from our customers who will be using the new SDK. If there is anything that is missing or things you would like to see, feel free to file an issue on pyVmomi Github repository.

How to verify SSO Multi-Master Replication is properly configured & working?

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I wrote an article yesterday demonstrating a hybrid configuration using the new SSO Multi-Master Replication in vSphere 5.5 between a vCenter Server for Windows & a VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance). The process itself is pretty straight forward and I even created a script which will automate the entire configuration. However, other than some text being shown at the end of the script stating that MMR (Multi-Master Replication) being successfully setup; how do you actually confirm MMR is properly configured & working when adding additional SSO instances?

This was something I was actually pondering about since the process was just too "easy" and pretty much seamless as it should be from a users perspective. In speaking with engineering, I came to learn that vmdird (VMware Directory Service) just leverages the LDAP standard for MMR. This means we can use any LDAP browser to connect to vmdird and view its current configuration.

Disclaimer: Please take extreme caution when viewing the vmdird database, this is primary for educational purposes. You should not be making any changes while in the database else you can negatively impact your environment.

In this example, we will be leveraging the free open source LDAP browser JXexplorer which can be run from variety of operating systems including Windows and Mac OS X. We will use JXexplorer to verify replication between our source (vCenter Server on Windows) is properly configured with our target (VCSA), you can also do this for a Windows to Windows vCenter Server deployment. We will also verify that replication itself is working by going through an example of creating an object in the source system and then verifying it has been successfully replicated to the target system.

Step 1 - Download and install JXplorer on your desktop, it does not have to run on the vCenter Server itself as we can remotely connect to the vmdird.

Step 2 - Create a new LDAP connection for your source vCenter Server on Windows using the following configuration below:

Protocol: LDAPv3
Port: 11711
Base DN: dc=vsphere,dc=local
Level: User + Password
User DN: cn=Administrator,cn=Users,dc=vsphere,dc=local

If everything was entered correctly, you should now be able to connect to the vmdird database.

Step 3 - To confirm MMR has been successfully configured between your source and target SSO Servers, you can expand the inventory to local->vsphere->Configuration->Sites->Servers. Here you should see the list of SSO Servers participating in a specific site. If you expand each server, you should see a replication agreement between the source and target of each server, this means everything is configured correctly.

In the example I had in my last blog post vcenter55-3.primp-industries.com is my vCenter Server for Windows and vcenter55-2.primp-industries.com is my VCSA. We can clearly see the replication agreements between our two systems and everything looks good.

Step 4 - To check whether MMR is working, a simple test is to create a user in vsphere.local domain using the vSphere Web Client and then compare the Users database between our source and target vmdird databases. To do so, you can open up two JXexplorer sessions, one connecting to the source vmdird and the other connecting to the destination vmdird.

MMR takes ~30sec to perform the replication and in the example above, I created a user called "wlam" on my source site and then I was able to refresh my destination system and the new user has automatically been replicated.

I really like the new SSO architecture and has really simplified SSO installation and configuration by a factor of 1000x. The built-in multi-master replication is completely transparent to the end user and this is the type of user experience our customers have come to expect of VMware. Big kudos to the SSO Engineering/Product team for all their hard work! There is still a lot of work being done to further enhance the overall install/upgrade experience and hopefully we will get to see some of these benefits in the very near future.