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Getting started with vMA

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Documentation

What is vMA?

  • Here is a video explaining vMA on VMware KBTV

Visit the vMA Home Page:

vMA Forum:

You will find latest Downloads, Reference Documentation and Community Discussions and links to resources.

Downloads

Tutorials

    Setting up vMA video by David Davis

    Setting up vMA to be a syslog server by Simon Long

    vi-fastpass

    Upgrade vMA:

    How to clone vMA:

    Backup & Restore vMA + vi-fastpass DB:

    Scripts and Tools

    vGhetto Script Repository:

    New tools and scripts to add/manage ESX(i) and vCenter targets on vMA 4.x:

    vMA Compatible Agent/Scripts(Third Party) Community List:

    Health check reports on your VMware environment:

    Taking screenshots of your VM using vMA 4.x:

    Host and VM shutdown with UPS integration using vMA:

    Backup VMs using vMA:

    Utilize vi-fastpass On vMA to run Perl script without clear text password:

    Tweaks

    Hot add memory to vMA or other supported Linux guestOSes using vSphere ESX(i) 4.x:

    How to increase/resize vMA Disks:

    Offline patching of vMA 4.x:

    How to install VMware VDDK on vMA:

    Reconfigure networking on vMA:

    vMA & Active Directory:

    Removing stale targets from vMA:

    Enable root account:

    Edit /etc/passwd using vi

    sudo vi /etc/passwd

    Change

    root:x:0:0:root:/root:/sbin/nologin

    to


    root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash

    Getting started with the vSphere SDK for Perl

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    Step 1. Visit the vSphere SDK for Perl Home Page

    You will find latest Downloads, Reference Documentation and Community Discussions and links to resources.

    Step 2. Become familiar with vSphere SDK for Perl Resources:

    Step 3. Explore new ways of managing your vSphere Platform using the remote CLI

    • Try some of the esxcfg-* commands bundled with the vCLI/RCLI

    Additional utilities bundled with vCLI/RCLI installation

    Step 4. Develop and create your own scripts and utlities using the vSphere SDK for Perl
    Become familiar vSphere 4.0 API Reference documentation

    Step 5. Learn how to get started with writing your own Perl script using vSphere SDK for Perl

    • This VMware document is a little out dated but it still all applies to writing your own Perl scripts using the vSphere SDK for Perl

    Step 6. For more scripts developed against the vSphere SDK for Perl, check out the vGhetto Script Repository for more examples!
    I think the easiest way to learn this is to start playing with some of the canned scripts and to make it even easier to have an environment that's all setup for you with both the vCLI and vSphere SDK for Perl, you can download VMware vMA.

    vSphere ESX 4.0 - Crash VM Bug?

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    We recently discovered an anomaly while backing up one of our development VMs using ghettoVCB.sh. When attempting to back up this powered on VM, the backup was successful however oddly, we were left with a powered off VM immediately following the first VMDK clone operation. After some investigation, we found that the problematic VM contained virtual disks spread across two datastores with dissimilar blocksizes (1MB and 2MB).

    The VM configuration alongside its main OS disk was stored on the datastore with a 1MB blocksize while it’s data disk (>256 GB) resided on the other datastore which was initialized with a 2MB blocksize. We came to the conclusion that this might have had something to do with the VM configuration residing on a datastore with a blocksize that was smaller than what is needed for the larger VMDK (which was on a datastore with an ample blocksize). Manually snapshotting this VM apparently fails however different behavior was experienced when the commands are executed from a script.

    Believing that this was a corner case, we decided that it was best practice to keep all VMFS volume block sizes consistent. This was to be remediated at a later time.

    Today we noticed a blog post http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/08/24/vsphere-vm-snapshots-and-block-size/ from Duncan Epping regarding the snapshot issue. This may not be a corner case as we thought so we wanted to share this finding with everyone.

    If you have a similar configuration from above, it is guaranteed that the VM will crash if you run a script that tries to take a snapshot of the described VM and then subsequently exports the VMDK using vmkfstools.

    Here is a video displaying the symptoms decribed from above:
    http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/crashVM

    Output from script execution on VM: Quentin:

    [root@himalaya ~]# ./crashVM.sh Quentin /vmfs/volumes/dlgCore-NFS-bigboi.VM-Backups/Quentin-clone.vmdk
    thinking, give me a few ...
    The power state of VM: "Quentin" is On
    Extracted VmId and locating VM configured datastore (which should live on a smaller VMFS block size)
    Located VMDK: "/vmfs/volumes/himalaya-local-SAS.Savvio/Quentin/Quentin.vmdk"
    Trying to create snapshot ... (this should fail)
    Create Snapshot:
    Trying to vmkfstools copy "/vmfs/volumes/himalaya-local-SAS.Savvio/Quentin/Quentin.vmdk" (this should REALLY fail! right?)
    Destination disk format: VMFS zeroedthick
    Cloning disk '/vmfs/volumes/himalaya-local-SAS.Savvio/Quentin/Quentin.vmdk'...
    Clone: 9% done.

    Download crashVM.sh script