WilliamLam.com

How to unregister vCenter plugin/extension using the MOB

by // 20 Comments

I saw a post on the VMTN forums the other day about unregistering a vCenter plugin. The user had a bad installation of an early preview of NetApp's VSC utility. After uninstalling the plugin, the user was still unable to unlink the plugin from vCenter. There is actually a pretty simple solution to this problem which can be accomplished by using the vSphere MOB.

UPDATE (10/16/22) - As of vSphere 8, you can now easily unregister vCenter plugins within the vSphere UI. Select the specific plugin and then click on remove button.

Here are the instructions to remove a specific plugin/extension from your vCenter server:

1. Point your web browser to your vCenter server: https://your_vc_server/mob and login.

2. Click on content:

3. Locate and click on ExtensionManager:

4. Click on the plugin you are interested in removing:

5. Record the plugin key id which will be used to remove the plugin:

6. Now, go back to previous page and at the bottom click on the function "UnregisterExtension". A new window will open and ask for the plugin key id which was recorded from above. Enter the key and click on the "Invoke Method" to remove the plugin

You can now refresh the page and you will see that the plugin is no longer available. You can restart your vSphere Client to see that the plugin has now been removed.

The following operation can also be performed using a script, here is a vSphere SDK for Perl script that does just that: pluginExtensionManager.pl

Script - Configure VM Disk Shares (vmDiskSharesMgmt.pl)

by // 3 Comments

I recently received an email about automating the configuration of VM disk shares. I thought it was an interesting request since I do not know how many people actually make use of this feature. By default, the shares on a virtual disk is set to "normal" or 1000 shares. You can change the value between low (500), normal (1000), high (2000) or a custom value. The following script helps a user to perform a bulk update across multiple VMs and supports multiple virtual disks.

Download: vmDiskSharesMgmt.pl

The script requires that you connect to your vCenter server and provide the following input parameters:

--diskshares_file = Is the name of the diskshares input file that contains the names of the VMs, the hard disks and their corresponding shares value which can be (low, normal, high or custom)

Here is an example of the diskshares input file:

[vi-admin@scofield ~]$ cat diskshares.txt
# [VMNAME];[HDX,SHARES_VALUE]=[HDY,SHARES_VALUE]=[HDZ,SHARES_VALUES]
#
# SHARES_VALUE = low, normal, high, XXXX (custom)
#
# e.g.
# myvm;hd1,low=hd2,high=hd3=2001
#
Synapse;hd1,high
Imager;hd1,low=hd2,1500=hd3,2500=hd4,high
William-XP;hd1,3000

In the above example, we have the following VMs and configurations to be set:

Synapse
Hard Disk1 = high (2000)

Imager
Hard Disk1 = low (500)
Hard Disk2 = 1500
Hard Disk3 = 2500
Hard Disk4 = high (2000)

William-XP
Hard Disk1 = 3000

Here is an example execution:

Here we verify one of the VMs "Imager" and it's configured disk shares:

Hopefully you will find this script to be useful

How to configure Likewise "Open" AD intergration on vMA

by // 10 Comments

I recently received a question about whether it was possible to configure Active Directory integration with vMA. Out of the box, this is not a feature that is available by default but can be set up. There are many articles online that provide instructions on configuring AD integration on UNIX/Linux host but they may not always be as straight forward to implement.

[Read more...]