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Automate Enabling VM Storage Profiles Capability in vSphere

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I recently had to rebuild one of my lab environments that consisted of a vCenter Server and several ESXi hosts and one of the capabilities I required was VM Storage Profiles. In a brand new vSphere environment, VM Storage Profiles is disabled by default, presumably due to licensing as this feature is not available in every SKU. To enable VM Storage Profiles, you will need to connect to your vCenter Server using either the vSphere Web Client or the legacy vSphere C# Client as seen in the screenshot below.

Another way of enabling the VM Storage Profiles feature is through an automated fashion using the vSphere APIs where this functionality is exposed.

Note: To manage and consume VM Storage Profiles, you will still need to use the vSphere Web Client or vSphere C# Client as the APIs for this functionality is not yet available.

VM Storage Profiles is enabled on a per vSphere Cluster basis and there is a boolean property called spbmEnabled which determines whether this feature is enabled or disabled. To update this property, you will need to use the ReconfigureComputeResource_Task method.

Here is are two examples of implementing the API both in a PowerCLI script as well as a vSphere SDK for Perl script:

PowerCLI:

In my lab environment, I have a vSphere Cluster called "Cluster" and you can use PowerCLI to check whether VM Storage Profiles is enabled or not by running this command (replace Cluster with the name of your vSphere Cluster):

(Get-Cluster -Name Cluster).extensionData.ConfigurationEx.SpbmEnabled

To enable VM Storage Profiles, you can then call the Enable-StorageProfile function along with the name of the vSphere Cluster which is just called "Cluster":

 

vSphere SDK for Perl:

To enable VM Storage Profiles using the vSphere SDK for Perl, I wrote a quick script called storageProfileMgmt.pl which allows you to query whether a vSphere Cluster has VM Storage Profiles as well as enabling and disabling the feature. Here is a screenshot demonstrating how the script works:

Does ESXi Support DDNS (Dynamic DNS)?

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An interesting feature request that was raised internally was for ESXi to support DDNS (Dynamic DNS) which allows a host client to update it's DNS record when using a DHCP Server. In most environments, to assign a hostname from DHCP, a DHCP reservation is used and this is maintained by the DHCP Server versus DDNS, where it is maintained by the client. Thanks to my colleague Eric Wager who did some quick research and found that ESXi does in fact supports DDNS and has been since ESXi 5.0.

I have not worked with DDNS much in the past and I have only seen it used for free/paid online services targeted at consumers to provide a well known address when their public IP Address changes frequently as with most ISPs. If your DHCP Server supports DDNS, this can be a handy feature to have, especially as you add new hosts you no longer have to manually create individual DNS record before hand and great for a lab environment. I did a big more digging to have a better understanding of how DDNS works with ESXi.

To enable support for DDNS on your ESXi host, you just need to set the hostname for the following ESXi Advanced Setting:

/Misc/PreferredHostName

You can do this in a variety of ways using either the vSphere Web/C# Client or using the command-line with ESXCLI.

Here is the syntax for the command:

esxcli system settings advanced set -o /Misc/PreferredHostName -s vesxi04.primp-industries.com

Once you have configured the setting, for the changes to go into effect, you will need to restart the management network. The easiest way to do this is via DCUI which you can run remotely by just typing dcui if you have an SSH session to your ESXi host. If you are using scripted install such as Kickstart, this can easily be automated as part of the post-install and upon first boot, DDNS will be enabled and configured with the proper hostname.

To test this in my lab environment, before enabling DDNS, I performed a reverse lookup of the assigned IP Address of my ESXi host from my DHCP server. In this example, the host received the address 192.168.1.135.

As you can see from the screenshot, a hostname could not be resolved as I would expect. After our changes, if we perform the reverse lookup again, we should now see the hostname that we had configured.

Another useful tidbit is the DHCP Client on ESXi is an ISC BIND implementation and this means if you require advanced things such as authentication keys, you can configured these options in /etc/dhclient-vmkX.conf where X is the specific VMkernel interface. For most deployments, you should not have to edit this file. Also if you want to prevent your DHCP Server from overriding the hostname of your ESXi host, you can add the following entry to the dhclient-vmkX.conf configuration file:

interface vmk0 {
   supersede host-name "vesxi04.primp-industries.com";
}

Just when I thought I knew about all the awesome features ESXi offers, it is a nice surprise to learn about another one!

Handy Keyboard Shortcuts for the vSphere Web Client

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After publishing an article about the vSphere Web Client Recent History Feature, I received question from a reader asking about the keyboard shortcuts that were available as part of the legacy vSphere C# Client. The reader really enjoyed these shortcuts as a way to quickly navigate between the various inventories and was wondering if similar keyboard shortcuts existed for the new vSphere Web Client? I was not able to find anything in our documentation and decided to reach out to our UE (User Experience) folks to see if they could assist.

Though we do not have every single keyboard shortcut that was available from the legacy vSphere C# Client, we actually do have quite a few and this somehow must have gotten missed during documentation (I have filed documentation bug on this). In talking to our UE folks, some of the challenges in adding the keyboard shortcuts was to find shortcuts that have not already been taken by either a web browser (vSphere Web Client is a browser application) or the Operating System used to connect to the vSphere Web Client. It was also very important if new shortcuts were added, that it would be easy to understand. As you can see this was not a trivial task at all.

The screenshot below provides a quick overview of the available keyboard shortcuts for the vSphere Web Client. Take a look at the table below for a more detailed break down of each keyboard shortcut.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard Combination Action
Ctrl+Alt+s
 Quick Search
Ctrl+Alt+Home OR Ctrl+Alt+1
 Home Screen
Ctrl+Alt+2
 Virtual Infrastructure Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+3
 Hosts and Clusters Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+4
 VMs and Templates Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+5
 Datastores and Datastore Clusters Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+6
 Networking Inventory

I was able to verify these shortcuts on both a Mac OS X system as well as a on Windows. This is something I definitely will be bookmark as a useful reference. If there are other keyboard shortcuts that you have grown to rely on in the legacy vSphere C# Client and would like to see in the new vSphere Web Client, feel free to leave a comment and I will make sure it gets to our UE folks.