I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that we have a minor update to the VMware Tools for Nested ESXi Fling (esx-tools-for-esxi-9.7.2-0.0.5911061.i386.vib) and you can find the list of changes below.
What's new in version 1.2:
If you have any feedback, feel free to leave a comment here or on the Flings page.
I really enjoy hearing from my readers, especially when they share some of the unique challenges they have come across or boundaries they have pushed with our VMware software. Several weeks back I received an interesting email from a reader named John Clendenen who was able to get ESXi 6.0 running on both his Apple Xserve 3,1 as well as Xserve 2,1! To be honest, I was pretty surprised to hear that this worked and not only that, there was not a whole lot that John had to do to get it working. I thought this was a pretty cool setup and asked if John was interested in sharing more details with the VMware/Mac OS X community in case others were interested.
Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.
*** This is a guest blog post from John Clendenen ***
For the past 5 years, I have lived in New York where I work at various print and post-production studios. The IT situations in many of these locations is often home-grown and sub-adequate, if not barely functional, so I took it upon myself to learn OS X Server administration. I have a background in computer science and networking, so it wasn’t a huge leap to step into administration. I was able to gradually build one studio’s IT infrastructure form a single AFP share with incessant permissions problems, to an Open Directory driven, single sign-on infrastructure with mobile homes, messaging etc.. However, with each OS X Server update, things broke, and I was spending a lot of time putting out fires.
This led me to pursue virtualization in hopes of isolating services on separate machines, without telling the studio to go buy 8 Apple Mac Minis. However, I needed to learn how to do this, before pitching it to them, so I looked on Craigslist for some cheap hardware. I found an Xserve 2,1, which I was able to talk down to $100. I also found a brief post in a thread that said that the Xserve 2,1 ran ESXi 5.5 without issue. I figured I’d take the plunge and just resell it on eBay if it didn’t work out.
Since then, my home lab has grown considerably, and I have learned that the best way to provide Mac services, is simply to use Linux (I’ve had a great experience with Netatalk). That said, Open Directory, Software Update, Caching and a few other services still need to be run on a Mac, so it’s still necessary to have the hardware. For a while, I had 3 Xserves, all purchased very cheaply, running VMs. I just sold one, and will sell another in the next month or two in favor of some Supermicro hardware (I really am mostly running Linux VM’s at this point). I’ll keep the one to run a few Mac OS X VMs. I’m still working on getting Samba 4 to work as the PDC, but once that is running smoothly, I’ll have a functional environment that I can take to the studios where I work (with approved hardware of course). Then I’ll have an improved work experience, while also pulling some extra income on the installation/maintenance.
Anyway, you’ve come here to read about running ESXi 6.0 on an Xserve 2,1. Well, it works. It’s 7 years old, and not officially supported, but you already know that. So, if you were considering it, I doubt anything here will dissuade you. On top of that, there’s not much for me to say other than, it works. No tricks to it, just install and you’re off.
This is my home custom 13u rack with sound insulation and active air flow. Networking is in the back (Ubiquiti). It sits in a lofted storage area with an A/C and vents into the bathroom.
Here you see an Xserve 3,1 on top of an Xserve 2,1. There’s a blank unit because I just sold an Xserve 2,1 on eBay, and the other 2,1 will be for sale soon as well to make room for a 4 node 2U Supermicro Server. The NAS is comprised of a 4u head unit and a 4U JBOD running Centos. Last of course, is a 2U CyberPower UPS which is really just to condition the power and keep brownouts from taking down the system.
I have about a dozen VM’s running between the 2 Xserves. I have each Mac OS X service separated on it’s own installation. This way I can run updates per service. It’s especially nice to have Open Directory separate from less important services. I also have Debian, Centos and OpenBSD VMs running various services. Getting the Xserve 3,1 running ESXi 6 is possible, but more problematic. Now that I have it working, I’m dropping the 2,1’s simply because the processors aren’t multithreaded. I am currently working on a companion article to this one, detailing my experience with the Xserve 3,1, so that information will be available soon.
1. Don’t use the RAID backplane/interconnect or count on using it. ESXi 6 does not recognize it, and RDM appears to work at first and then will crash your VM and never show up again. You can have it installed in the Xserve without any issue, but you’ll get a lot more mileage out of the hardware if you have the standard backplane/interconnect.
The backplane you want appears periodically on eBay. The part number is: 661-4648
2. If/once you have the non-RAID backplane/interconnect, keep in mind that it is SATAII and will only support 3Gb/s. I am using 3 old 500Gb WD RE3’s, but I’d recommend using some older SSDs that will max out the SATAII interface without paying for speed you can’t use. Be sure you consult the Apple Drive Module compatibility page to make sure you have the right drive caddies. They all fit, but they don’t all work.
Apple Drive Module Compatibility Chart: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT1219
3. PCIE Flash is a good idea, whether you use it for cache, VM’s or as the ESXi boot disk, it is by far the fastest storage option. I have not invested in it, but the good people at Mushkin have told me their Scorpion PCIE flash will work in ESXi 6. Please contact them yourself though before investing in one of their cards. I have not tested them. While this will give you the best performance out of your Xserve 2,1, it seems like overkill to me, but hey, if you want to push this thing, you might find some meaningful performance gains here.
Mushkin Scorpion PCIE Flash: http://www.poweredbymushkin.com/index.php/products/solid-state-drives.html
4. It might occur to you that replacing the optical drive with an ssd might be a good idea. While MCE Technologies makes “Optibay” for Xserve 2,1, the connection is IDE, so this is not recommended. I also don’t know if ESXi would recognize it. My gut says probably, but again, it’s too slow to be useful. It isn’t that cheap either.
MCE Technologies Optibay: http://store.mcetech.com/mm/merchant.mvc?Store_code=MTOS&Screen=PROD&Product_Code=OBSXGB-XS
There are a lot of options here. You can plug any network card that you want really as long as you can at least find an anecdotal account of it working on ESXi 6.
I have one such anecdote for you, and it is also a strong suggestion. The company Silicom makes/made several models of gigabit NICs which are all incredibly inexpensive, are all over eBay and work in ESXi 6. Buy the 6 port model. It’s cheap and you’ll get great scaling with ESXi load balancing across 8 gigabit ports.
The Xserve 2,1 has the added advantage here of an optional PCIX riser. If your model has one, or you find one for cheap, you can save even more on the Silicom NIC. The PCIE models go for $60-$80 on eBay, while the PCIX models go for $40.
ECC DDR2 is pretty cheap and easy to find used. I recommend memory4less though. I had to return some RAM that was mislabeled from a random eBay distributor. Memory4less will get it right. http://www.memory4less.com/
One great perk of the Xserve 2,1, is that you can upgrade the single processor hardware to dual processor. You can pick up an additional processor on eBay for $40 or so, but you’ll need to get a heat sink as well. The single processor units come with a fake aluminum heat sink, but do not use it. You want a copper one. I believe the heat sinks in the Xserve 1,1 are the same. Don’t forget the thermal paste.
1. The Performance tab throws an error.
2. Not sure about the hardware sensors, but it looks like not everything is working even if it’s showing up. I did not do any testing here.
Stay tune for Part II of John's guest blog post on running ESXi 6.0 on Xserve 3,1.
If you followed my previous blog post on How to audit VM reconfigurations and see what exactly changed, you may have concluded that historical VM configuration events may potentially be unavailable by the time you need to perform an audit. The reason for this is that the VM Events tables may have rotated out depending on the retention policy of your vCenter Server Database. This is where we can take advantage of the powerful vCenter Server Alarm feature which would allows us to capture every single VM reconfiguration and store this information outside of the vCenter Server. This not only allows you to reduce the amount of data stored in the vCenter Server Database but it also allows you to efficiently archive this data into a data warehouse or Big Data platform that provides more advanced analytics and reporting capabilities.
Building on top of our previous script, I have created a slightly modified version called Get-VMConfigChangesFromAlarm.ps1. The main difference is instead of passing in a VM object to look for past configuration changes, the script can now pull in information from a triggered VmReconfigureEvent and log the specific changes associated with that VM reconfiguration. The way in which it does this is by querying the following two environmental variables which are set when the vCenter Server alarm is triggered and below is an example of their values:
| Alarm Environmental Variable | Value |
|---|---|
| VMWARE_ALARM_TRIGGERINGSUMMARY | Event: VM reconfigured (9322) |
| VMWARE_ALARM_TARGET_ID | vm-125 |
In the first variable, what we care about is the eventId which is associated with the VM reconfiguration. What I have found is you have to take this ID and subtract 1 to get the event which actually contains the reconfiguration information that we want. The second variable provides us with the MoRef ID of the VM that was configured. Using these two pieces of information, we can then perform an event lookup to pull out the configuration changes that were made to that particular VM.
Here are the steps for creating the vCenter Server Alarm:
Step 1 - Ensure that the latest PowerCLI 6.0 Release 1 is installed on your vCenter Server. I will assume that this is how you wish to execute the PowerCLI script. If not, other options can include sending an SNMP trap to vRealize Orchestrator and have it perform the execution of the script.
Step 2 - Create a new Alarm and fill in the general settings as shown in the screenshots below.
Step 3 - Add the "VM reconfigured" trigger with the status set to "Unset", this will ensure you do not have a notification icon when the alarm is activated.
Step 4 - Select "Run a command" as the action and then paste the full path to where a "wrapper.bat" script will be located in the vCenter Server.
Step 5 - Create the "wrapper.bat" script on the vCenter Server system with the following (adjust the paths to fit your environment):
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c powershell.exe -noninteractive -noprofile -file C:\Users\primp\Desktop\Get-VMConfigChangesFromAlarm.ps1 >> C:\Users\primp\Desktop\alarm.log
The following snippet will execute the PowerCLI script and any console output will be re-directed to the alarm.log file (which can be helpful in troubleshooting errors in the script itself).
Step 6 - Download the Get-VMConfigChangesFromAlarm.ps1 script and place it on the vCenter Server system and ensure it aligns with the path of the wrapper.bat script. You will also need to edit the script to update the vCenter Server credentials as well as the log file in which the VM configurations will be stored. Currently it will just append to a file called alarm.txt.
If everything was configured successfully, you can now test the alarm by simply editing one of your VMs. If you click under Monitor->Events for the VM, you should see the alarm being triggered and that the script was executed.
If we take a look at our alarm.txt file, we should hopefully see the VM reconfiguration details logged like the following:
ChangeVersion : 2015-08-13T21:10:58.248345Z
DeviceChange : {VMware.Vim.VirtualDeviceConfigSpec}
Files : VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineFileInfo
MemoryMB : 8192
NumCPUs : 2
VMName : Test-VM
Start : 8/13/2015 9:11:17 PM
End : 8/13/2015 9:11:19 PM
State : success
User : VGHETTO.LOCAL\Administrator
Device : VirtualDisk
Operation : edit
Logging the output to a file is just one way of storing this data. I am sure some of you may want to modify the script to forward to a remote syslog collector like vRealize Log Insight for example or directly storing it into a Big Data platform. I will leave that as an exercise for my readers but hopefully this give you idea on how you can automatically archive all VM reconfigurations along with the what, when and who details for auditing and/or reporting purposes in the future.
Lastly, I wanted to give a big thanks to Jonathan Medd who helped me with a problem I was running into when trying to get a PowerCLI script to execute when using a vCenter Server Alarm. It turned out that I had the vCenter Server service configure to run as a local admin and switching it over to a Domain Account resolved my problem.