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ESXi 6.0 on Apple Xserve 2,1

08.20.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

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.

That said, I do have some recommendations and tips to help you if you want to get the most out of this hardware. 2 months ago, since I swapped out the RAID card for the standard backplane/interconnect and upgraded the RAM. It hasn’t skipped a beat since.

My System

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.

Storage

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

Network

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.

Memory

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/

Processors

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.

Minor Issues

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.

How to automatically log all VM configuration changes using a vCenter Server Alarm?

08.18.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

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.

How to audit VM reconfigurations and see what exactly changed?

08.13.2015 by William Lam // 27 Comments

A question that I almost always see come up on a regular basis is around the topic of auditing or understanding what configuration changes were made to a given Virtual Machine. Today, the process of identifying this information is actually quite difficult at least without resorting to a custom built solution which allows you to compare the configuration changes over time. This is definitely an area that VMware is investing heavily in and although I can not go into specific details, believe me when I say they are taking this very seriously both from a data completeness standpoint as well as simplifying the user experience.

Having said that, what options exists for customers today?

Custom Solution - A system that could periodically snapshot your VM configurations into some type of data warehouse or CMDB platform. There are many challenges here but the biggest one is efficiently capturing the changes and ensuring you do not impact the overall performance of your vCenter Server, especially with larger inventories.
vRealize Air Compliance - This is a new VMware SaaS offering which provides both compliance and remediation for your VM Configurations. I had a chance to preview this awhile back and I have to say it is a pretty slick solution. You can easily step back in time to see exactly what has changed for a given set of VMs, very intuitive UI. You can also add additional configurations to monitor and be alerted on when you are out of compliance. Definitely something worth checking out, especially for customers who must go through regular audit reviews.
vCenter Configuration Manager - I have not personally used this tool before, but I have been told it would also be possible to detect configuration changes for your VMs.
Enabling "Trivia" Logging in vCenter Server - Though this is an option, it is not one that I recommend for variety of reasons. The "Trivia" logging mode is very verbose and will generate huge amounts of data which will causes your logs to quickly rotate out if you are not forwarding to a remote syslog server. There's also additional overhead cost for this type of logging and more importantly, it may not capture all of the required data. This is an approach that some customers have tried but is not really a practical solution.

This topic has always been interesting to me and with several recent inquiries from the field, it got me thinking about this area again. While working on a completely different project, I ended up on Luc Dekens awesome blog and came across his Events Part 3: Auditing VM Device Changes article. If you take a look at the article, you will see that Luc shows you how you can easily audit changes to a VM's devices (e.g. Virtual Disk, CD-ROM, etc). What Luc demonstrated in his script is just a specific type of configuration, but the point is that this type of information has always been available, just not easily consumable.

The secret is to key off of the VmReconfiguredEvent which includes a configSpec property that captures the exact set of configuration changes for a given VM. Below is an example of the configSpec dump of one of these events. We can clearly see that this VM had its vCPUs modified to 4 and its vMEM modified to 20GB.

With this information, we can now easily query the configuration changes for a given VM by looking through its past events. Leveraging the awesome work that Lud has already done with his script, I slightly enhanced it to cover more than just device changes but overall VM configuration changes. With that, here is a PowerCLI script/function that I created called Get-VMConfigChanges.ps1

Note: The amount of historical events that you will be able to search through will purely depend on your Center Server DB's retention period of Tasks/Events. For VMs which have been deleted, you will not be able to retrieve any events as they must be associated with an object in the database.

Below is an example of how to use this function which accepts a VM object and the number of hours (default to 8) to search through the VM's events:

$vcserver = "192.168.1.150"
$vcusername = "*protected email*"
$vcpassword = "VMware1!"

Connect-VIServer -Server $vcserver -User $vcusername -Password $vcpassword

$vm = Get-VM "Test-VM"

Get-VMConfigChanges -vm $vm -hours 12

Disconnect-VIServer -Server $vcserver -Confirm:$false

From the output below, we can clearly see the following configuration changes have been applied:

Change vCPU to 2
Change vMEM to 4GB
Change vMEM to 5GB and Edited Virtual Disk (you can of course get further details by dumping more information)

Although this solution is not as clean as the vRealize Air Compliance offering, it does allow anyone to quickly pull out the relevant configuration changes for a given VM along with the user and time the configurations was performed. Hopefully this goes to show how powerful the vSphere Platform APIs really are and it is definitely worth while in learning how they work.