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How to Ack & Reset vCenter Alarm implementing hidden API method

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There was a recent question in the VMTN developers forum around automating the acknowledgment and resetting of a triggered vCenter alarm using vSphere SDK for Perl. This is actually a trivial task using the vSphere Client, you would first identify the alarm and acknowledge the alarm by right clicking on the alarm and selecting "Acknowledge Alarm". To reset the alarm, you would right click on the alarm and select "Reset Alarm to Green".

To automate this task using the vSphere SDK for Perl which uses the vSphere API, you would perform the same two API operations. Doing a search, you will find a method called AcknowledgeAarm which should does exactly that, but if you try to search for method to reset an alarm, you will notice no such method exists. This was something I was aware of since vSphere 3.5 API, but never understood why it was kept hidden.

UPDATE - The AcknowledgeAlarm API has been made public as of vSphere 7.x and later

Here is a screenshot of the alarmManager in the vSphere MOB and you will notice no methods pertains to resetting an alarm:

You might ask, how is the vSphere Client performing this operation and what API method is it using? Sadly, this operation is one of the many hidden API methods that VMware choose to hide and not public expose for various reasons.

However, there are several ways of identifying some of these hidden vSphere API methods and properties. When you install the vSphere Client on your workstation, there is a catalog directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\4.1\Catalogs\Default)  that is created based on the version of vSphere and within the vim directory, there are these *.vmsg files that contain information regarding the VIM API (Virtual Infrastructure Management API) and searching within these files, you will find some hidden goodies.

Searching the task.vmsg file and within the alarm section, you will see a method name called setAlarmStatus:

alarm.AlarmManager.setAlarmStatus.label = "Set alarm status"
alarm.AlarmManager.setAlarmStatus.summary = "Sets the status of an alarm for an entity"

As you can see, there are other methods with respect to the alarmManager that is documented, but the method above is not documented in the vSphere API reference. We can take this information and further validate by using the vSphere MOB to see what parameters are required for this method.

By generating the proper URL, you can see the method is exposed and the required parameters to this function:

We can perform one additional confirmation to ensure that the method above is actually the method the vSphere Client is performing when resetting an alarm. The tool that we will use here is Onyx, yep, it is not only useful for PowerCLI but for all vSphere developers and administrators. I created a dummy alarm that would trigger if a VM is powered on or powered off and by running Onyx to capture the API calls when acknowledging and resetting an alarm.

Here is the output from Onyx:

As you can see, the two operations uses the AcknowledgeAlarm and the hidden SetAlarmStatus API method. We now can definitively say that the above hidden API method is being used and now we need to figure out how we can incorporate this method into the existing vSphere SDK for Perl.

In this example, I will be working with the vSphere SDK for Perl found on vMA 4.1, but the same set of changes will apply to vCLI 4.x being installed on a Windows or Linux system. There are two client Perl stubs or Perl Modules that contains prototype and definition of a vSphere API method:

/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/VMware/VIM25Stub.pm (prototype definition)
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/VMware/VIM25Runtime.pm (method definition)

We will first edit the VIM25Runtime.pm module and if you are on vMA, you will need to use 'sudo' to edit the file. We will add the SetAlarmStatus entry try similar the AcknowledgeAlarm method:

Next we will edit the VIM25Stub.pm and again it will be very similar to an existing method, but now we must populate the parameters based on what we discovered from the vSphere MOB:

Now we are ready to implement this method in a vSphere SDK for Perl Script. I quickly threw together a script that helps manages your vCenter alarms using the CLI by listing all active and triggered alarms in either a red or yellow state.

Download Script: alarmManagement.pl

Here is an example of listing all triggered alarms that are either in a red or yellow state:

Here is an example of acking and resetting the above alarm and utilizing the new hidden API method that was just implemented:

There you have it, a method that was once hidden is no longer =)

If you are interested in locating other hidden API goodies, take a look at this post on How to browse the internal vSphere APIs

Does SIOC actually require Enterprise Plus & vCenter Server?

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After reading a recent blog post by Duncan Epping, SIOC, tying up some loose ends, I decided to explore whether or not VMware's Storage I/O Control feature actually requires an Enterprise Plus license and vCenter Server. To be completely honest, Duncan's article got me thinking but it was also my recent experience with VMware's vsish and the blog post I wrote What is VMware vsish? that made me think this might be a possibility. vsish is only available on ESXi 4.1 within the Tech Support Mode, but if you have access to debugging rpm from VMware, you can also obtain vsish for classic ESX.

Within vsish, there is a storage section and within that section there is a devices sub-section which provides information regarding your storage devices that includes paths, partitions, IO statistics, queue depth and new SIOC state information.

Here is an example of the various devices that I can view on an ESXi 4.1 host:

~ # vsish
/> ls /storage/scsifw/devices/
t10.F405E46494C45400A50555567414D2D443E6A7D276D6F6E4/
mpx.vmhba1:C0:T0:L0/
mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0/

Here is an example of various properties accessible to a given storage device:

/> ls /storage/scsifw/devices/t10.F405E46494C45400A50555567414D2D443E6A7D276D6F6E4/
worlds/
handles/
filters/
paths/
partitions/
uids/
iormInfo
iormState
maxQueueDepth
injectError
statson
stats
inquiryVPD/
inquirySTD
info

In particular, we are interested in iormState and you can see the value by just using the cat command:

/> cat /storage/scsifw/devices/t10.F405E46494C45400A50555567414D2D443E6A7D276D6F6E4/iormState
1596

This value may not mean a whole lot and I have seen this as the default value when SIOC is disabled as well as 2000 from my limited set of tests. Now, since we can access these particular SIOC parameter, I wanted to see how this value was affected when SIOC is enabled and disabled. To test this, I used the following VMware KB1022091 to enabling additional SIOC logging which goes directly to /var/log/messages with the logger tag "storageRM", this allows you to easily filter out SIOC logs via simple grep.

For testing purposes, you can just enable the logging to level 2 which is more than sufficient to get the necessary output. You will perform the following command to change the default SIOC logging level from 0 to 2 using Tech Support Mode:

~ # esxcfg-advcfg -s 2 /Misc/SIOControlLogLevel
Value of SIOControlLoglevel is 2

Now you will want to open a separate SSH session to your ESXi host and tail /var/log/messages to monitor the SIOC logs:

~ # tail -f /var/log/messages | grep storageRM
Oct 10 18:39:05 storageRM: Number of devices on host = 3
Oct 10 18:39:05 storageRM: Checked device t10.F405E46494C45400A50555567414D2D443E6A7D276D6F6E4 iormEnabled= 0 LatThreshold =30
Oct 10 18:39:05 storageRM: Checked device mpx.vmhba1:C0:T0:L0 iormEnabled= 0 LatThreshold =232
Oct 10 18:39:05 storageRM: Checked device mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 iormEnabled= 0 LatThreshold =30
Oct 10 18:39:05 storageRM: rateControl: Current log level: 2, new: 2
Oct 10 18:39:05 storageRM: rateControl: Alas - No device with IORM enabled!

You should see something similar to the above. In my lab, it is seeing an iSCSI volume, local storage and CD-ROM and you will notice there is an iormEnabled flag and all three has SIOC disabled and the default latency threshold specified by LatThreshold, which is 30ms by default.

Now we know what these values are when SIOC is disabled, let's see what happens when we enable SIOC from vCenter on this ESXi 4.1 host. I am using evaluation license for the host which supports the Storage I/O Control from a licensing perspective. After enabling SIOC and using the default 30ms on my iSCSI volume, I took a look at the SIOC logs and saw that there were some changes in the logs:

~ # tail -f /var/log/messages | grep storageRM
Oct 10 18:48:56 storageRM: Number of devices on host = 3
Oct 10 18:48:56 storageRM: Checked device t10.F405E46494C45400A50555567414D2D443E6A7D276D6F6E4 iormEnabled= 1 LatThreshold =30
Oct 10 18:48:56 storageRM: Found device t10.F405E46494C45400A50555567414D2D443E6A7D276D6F6E4 with datastore openfiler-iSCSI-1
Oct 10 18:48:56 storageRM: Adding device t10.F405E46494C45400A50555567414D2D443E6A7D276D6F6E4 with datastore openfiler-iSCSI-1

As you can see now, SIOC is enabled and the iormEnabled flag has changed from 0 to 1. This should not be a surprise, now let's take a look at vsish storage property and see if that has changed:

~ # vsish -e get /storage/scsifw/devices/t10.F405E46494C45400A50555567414D2D443E6A7D276D6F6E4/iormState
1597

If you recall from the previous command above, the default value was 1596 and after enabling SIOC, the value has incremented by one. I found this to be an interesting observation and I tried a few other configurations including enabling SIOC on local storage and found that this value was always incremented by 1 if SIOC was enabled and decrement or kept the same if SIOC is disabled.

As you may or may not know, SIOC does not use vCenter, it is only required when enabling the feature and from this simple test, this looks to be the case. It is also important to note, as pointed out by Duncan in his blog post that the latency statistics is stored in .iormstats.sf file which is stored within each of the VMFS datastores that has SIOC enabled. Putting all this together, I hypothesize that Storage I/O Control could actually be enabled without an Enterprise Plus license and without vCenter Server.

The test utilized the following configuration:

  • 2 x virtual ESXi 4.1 hosts licensed as free ESXi (vSphere 4.1 Hypervisor)
  • 1 x 50GB iSCSI volume exported from Openfiler VM
  • 2 x CentOS VM installed with iozone to generate some IO

Here is a screenshot of the two ESXi 4.1 free licensed hosts displaying the licensed version and each running CentOS VM residing on this shared VMFS iSCSI volume:

I configured vm1 which resides on esxi4-1 and set the disk shares to Low with default value of 500 and configured vm2 which resides on esxi4-4 and set the disk shares to High with default value of 2000:

I then ran iozone a filesystem benchmark tool on both CentOSes VM which is generating some amount of IO on the single VMFS volume shared by both ESXi 4.1 hosts:

I then view the SIOC logs on both ESXi 4.1 in /var/log/vmkernel and tail the IO statistics for the VMFS iSCSI datastore using vsish:

Note: The gray bar tells you which host you are viewing the data for which is being displayed by using GNU Screen. The first two screen displays the current status of SIOC which is currently disabled and the second two screen displays the current device queue depth which in my lab environment defaulted to 128, by default it should be 32 as I remember.

Now I enable SIOC on both ESXi 4.1 hosts using vsish and perform the command:

~ # vsish -e set /storage/scsifw/devices/t10.F405E46494C45400A50555567414D2D443E6A7D276D6F6E4/iormState 1597

Note: Remember to run a "get" operation to check the default value and you will just need to increment by one to enable SIOC. From my testing, the default value will either be 1596 or 2000 and you will change it to 1597 or 2001 respectively.

You can now validate that SIOC is enabled by going back to your SSH session and verify the logs:

As you can see, the iormEnabled flag has now changed from 0 to 1, which means SIOC is now enabled.

If you have running virtual machines on the VMFS volume and SIOC is enabled, you should now see a  iormstats.sf latency file stored in the VMFS volume:

After awhile, you can view IO statistics via vsish to see what the device queue is currently configured to and slowly see the throttle based on latency. For this particular snapshot, you can see the vm1 was configured with "high" disk share and vm2 was configured with "low" disk share and there is a large queue depth for the very bottom ESXi host versus the other host which only has a smaller queue depth.

Note: During my test I did notice that the queue depth was dramatically decreased from 128 and even from 32 to single digits. I am pretty sure it was due to the limited amount of resources in my lab that some of these numbers were a little odd.

To summarize, it seems that you can actually enable Storage I/O Control without the use of vCenter Server and an Enterprise Plus license, however, this requires the use of vsish which is only found on ESXi 4.1 and not on classic ESX 4.1. I also found that if you enabled SIOC via this method and joined your host to vCenter Server, it is not aware of these changes and marks SIOC as disabled even though the host actually has SIOC enabled. If you want vCenter to see the update, you will need to enabled SIOC via vCenter.

I would also like to thank Raphael Schitz for helping me validate some of my initial findings.

Update: I also found hidden Storage I/O Control API method called ConfigureDatastoreIORMOnHost which allows you to enable SIOC directly on the host, which validates the claim from above that this can be done directly on an ESX or ESXi host.

How to run a VM on Dropbox Storage

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In my previous blog post How to backup VMs in ESX onto Dropbox, I showed you how to backup your virtual machines on ESX to your Dropbox account, but who said it should stop there? I realized after playing with Dropbox on ESX, I had a crazy idea of trying to run a virtual machine that was stored in my Dropbox account. Since I am using the free Dropbox account, I have a maximum of 2GB of online storage and decided to spin up a tiny Linux virtual machine and upload it to my Dropbox account. Not surprised, I was able to register the virtual machine and fire it up and it worked like a charm.

Now, this got me thinking .... if I can run a virtual machine from Dropbox via ESX, could I get another ESX host to see this same Dropbox account? The answer is YES! One feature of Dropbox is the ability to access your files across multiple devices: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX desktop, iPhone, iPad, Andriod and of course ESX. For demonstration purposes, I created two virtual ESX 4.1 hosts called west and east and authorized both hosts to access my Dropbox account.

Here is a screenshot of the two ESX hosts via "My Computers" tab on Dropbox account:

Here is a screenshot of the small 1GB Linux Debian virtual machine I created and uploaded to my Dropbox account:

Here is a screenshot of both ESX hosts (east and west) accessing the directory of the small Linux virtual machine:

I registered the virtual machine on the west coast ESX host and here is a side by side screenshot of both vSphere Clients:

As you can see, the virtual machine is powered on and running. If we take a look at where the virtual machine configuration file and disks is stored, you will see it is currently on the Dropbox account accessed by "west" coast ESX host:

Here is a screenshot showing the registration of the small Linux VM on west and there is currently nothing registered on east:

Let's say we had a failure on the west coast ESX host and we need to access this virtual machine via east coast ESX host. I registered the virtual machine and powered it on and now the system is back up and running again:

Again, we can see the configuration and virtual disk is now being accessed from the Dropbox account by the east coast ESX host:

We also confirm that the virtual machine is now registered on the east coast ESX and there is nothing running on the west coast ESX host:

As you can see from this simple demonstration, you can easily run a virtual machine and have it accessible via multiple ESX host, though I would not recommend you go out and start putting your production VMs on Dropbox, but it is an interesting idea for cloud storage 😉

Note: While testing, I found the synchronization process between the two ESX host to be slightly off and were not always up to date when a change was made. I had to restart the Dropbox daemon several times after I created the virtual machine for the other ESX host to see the updated files. I am pretty sure it is an issue with the daemon versus dropbox, since I can see the files updated on the web browser immediately. I would be very careful to ensure that only one host is accessing the files, else you could see some discrepancies.