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How to automate NTP configurations on the VCSA using the CLI

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NTP configurations should be a mandatory setting for everyone, regardless of whether we are talking about VMware products or general infrastructure software. It is just as critical as having proper DNS configured and can cause a whole slew of issues if not configured or setup properly. A question that was raised internally a couple of days back was around automating NTP configurations on the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) which is normally performed through the VAMI web interface as seen in the screenshot below.

Instead of using the VAMI UI, the user was interested in automating it through the command-line and wondered if this was possible. This is definitely possible among other VAMI operations by leveraging the vpxd_servicecfg utility and there are a couple of options when configuring NTP on a VCSA 5.5 system.

The option that most of you will probably using is to configure a list of NTP servers (comma separated). To do so, you can run the following command (replace the NTP server with your own):

/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg timesync write ntp '172.30.0.100' ''

This command should have a return code of 0, else there maybe an issue connecting to your time source from the VCSA. You can also confirm the operation was successful or query the current configuration by running the following command:

/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg timesync read

If you wish to synchronize your time with the underlying ESXi host through VMware Tools, then you can run the following command:

/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg timesync write tools '' ''

Finally, if you wish to disable time synchronization on the VCSA for whatever reason, you can do so by running this command:

/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg timesync write none '' ''

Note: If the VCSA is joined to an Active Directory domain, then the time synchronization is provided by your Active Directory server and no additional configurations are required.

Once you have configured your NTP servers, you should can also manually force a sync to ensure the current date/time is correct by running the following command:

sntp -P no -r [NTP-SERVER]

How to restart the ESXi management network via command-line?

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A great question that was brought up on Twitter yesterday by Andreas Peetz who asked the following:

Is there a way to restart the mgmt network in ESXi via a cmd line? You can do this from the DCUI, but I want a script! 

There are a variety of reasons why you would want to restart the Management Network on your ESXi host and usually it is related to troubleshooting or configurations such as renewing the DHCP lease on a particular VMkernel interface. For Andreas, it was renewing the DHCP lease and this is actually a use case I have heard from others before. Currently, the only way to restart the Management Network for your ESXi host is using the DCUI (Direct Console User Interface) either through the console using iLO/iDRAC/etc. or remotely over SSH.

Andreas' question is not a new one and I have heard this ask in the past. I have even inquired about it when I was a customer but was told it was not possible and had to use the DCUI. I was not really satisfied with the answer I provided to Andreas, so I decided to do a bit of digging myself and ping some engineers. Apparently this functionality is actually exposed through a legacy command-line utility called esxcfg-vmknic in the ESXi Shell as well as locally/remotely via the ESXCLI network namespace which is used to manage the VMkernel interface (Thanks to Andres for mentioning ESXCLI method).

There are two flags that this command supports which is to enable and disable a VMkernel interface. This is actually what the DCUI is doing when you ask it to restart the Management Network and is very similar to restarting a service on a UNIX/Linux system, it first shutdowns the service and then starts it back up. Given this information, if you wish to restart the Management Network of your ESXi host you can specify the name of the Management Network portgroup and execute the enable operation immediately after performing the disable operation.

To do this from the command-line, you would add a ; (semi-colon) between the two commands so they are executed one after another to ensure your VMkernel interface is enabled after you have disabled it. Here is an example of the command:

esxcli network ip interface set -e false -i vmk0; esxcli network ip interface set -e true -i vmk0

Automating VMware ITBM (IT Business Management) configuration

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Over the years I have had the privilege to install the majority of VMware products in either my production environment when I was a customer or in my personal home lab for testing. While in the process of learning about the vCloud Automation Center 6.0 to automate the installation and configuration, I came across a VMware product that I was not very familiar with called VMware ITBM (IT Business Management Suite). ITBM integrates with vCloud Automation Center and provides your business with insights into various cost analysis and metrics for both your public and private clouds.

VMware ITBM is provided as a Virtual Appliance and given that it integrates with vCloud Automation Center which I just been deployed in my home lab, I thought I take a look to see how one could automate the initial configuration setup. After manually deploying ITBM, I found the setup through the VAMI to be pretty straight forward and one could easily automate this. There is a command-line utility called /usr/sbin/itfm-config that we will be using to register our ITBM instance to vCloud Automation Center. To help simplify the setup, I have created a simple shell script called configureITBM.sh that will automatically configure ITBM given three simple variable input:

  • VCAC_VA_SERVER - Hostname/IP of your vCAC VA Server
  • VCAC_SSO_PASSWORD - The SSO password
  • TIMEZONE  - Timezone

Here is a screenshot of executing the script on the ITBM Virtual Appliance:

To verify that the configuration was successful, we can login to the VAMI interface of ITBM by opening a browser to the hostname/IP Address:5480 and we should see under the Status section we are now connected to our vCloud Automation Center Server.

Once we have confirmed that ITBM has been successfully configured we can now head over to our vCloud Automation Center Server and we should see a new tab called Business Management.

As mentioned earlier, I have not used the ITBM product before but I do recall a demo that was given during an Alpha of vCloud Automation Center 6.0 and I was quite impressed with the amount of information and customization this tool provides for cost and operational analysis.