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How To Run The SilverLining Fling Without Installing It In vCloud Director

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A few weeks back the VMware Lab's team released a cool new fling called SilverLining which allows users to build a simplified user-interface for vCloud Director. This interface can be run from any modern web-browser that supports HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. To access the SilverLining interface, you must first install it on a vCloud Director 5.1 Cell.

From a development or proof of concept perspective, it would be really nice to be able to run SilverLining locally from your desktop and point it to a valid vCloud Director 5.1 instance for testing. Well, this is exactly what Andrea Siviero, a Consulting Architect for VMware discovered while playing around with the SilverLining Fling.

UPDATE: 2/28 - For Safari, you can use open /Applications/Safari.app/ --args -disable-web-security

Disclaimer: The solution described here is specifically for Chrome running on Mac OS X or Windows. I have not looked into equivalent settings for other browsers.

Here are the steps required to make this work:

Step 1 - Download SilverLining and extract the contents to your local desktop

Step 2 - Under Silverlining->js directory, there is a file called main.js that needs to be modified. Add the following right under "$(document).ready(function() {" which should point to the base URL of your vCloud Director instance:

localStorage.server = "https://vcd.primp-industries.com";

Step 3 - Launch Chrome with the additional argument via the command-line and load the index.html in the SilverLining directory:

open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/ --args -disable-web-security

Note: For Windows version of Chrome just pass in the following either via command-line or shortcut to Chrome.exe -disable-web-security

If everything was successful, you should be able to login to the vCloud Organization of your choice and see all the vApps and Catalogs you have access to!

If you receive the "You are attempting to connect to a system no longer supported" shown in the screenshot below:

You may be pointing to a vCloud Director instance that is using a self-signed certificate and you will need to trust the site before proceeding. To do so, open up a new tab and enter the following URL (substituting your vCloud Director URL):

https://vcd.primip-industries.com/api/versions

Click on the "Proceed Anyway" and then reload the index.html page and you should now be able to login to vCloud Director.

I would like to thank Andrea for sharing this awesome tip! Now you can easily develop and test your own custom interface using the Javascript SDK provided by SilverLining all on your desktop. Best of all, you can now point this to any remote vCloud Director 5.1 instance whether that be private or public!

New Application Awareness API in vSphere 5

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Application Awareness HA is not a new feature in vSphere 5, it has actually has been around since vSphere 4.1. With this feature, vSphere HA can monitor heartbeats generated from an application monitor within the guestOS and reboot the virtual machine.

What is actually new in vSphere 5 is the availability of the Application Awareness API for anyone to consume and integrate into their own application and/or script. Prior to this, the API was only exposed to ISV and 3rd party vendors with solutions such as Symantec's ApplicationHA and Neverfail's vAppHA.

The Application Awareness API (will be shorthanded as AAA, going forward) is supported in both Linux and Windows (32/64bit) and can be accessed by installing a package within the guestOS. This package includes the necessary AAA libraries to create your own program/scripts in C, C++, Java and Perl. In addition, the package also includes a pre-compiled binary (vmware-appmonitor) that implements all the AAA methods that can easily be called from within a script or program. AAA uses the VMware Tools as communication channel to the ESX(i) host and you will need to ensure VMware Tools is installed and running. Since the communication is between VMware Tools and the ESX(i) host, there is no reliance on a TCP/IP network for this communication channel.

UPDATE: You can download GuestAppMonitor SDK here.

There are currently 6 AAA methods:

  • VMGuestAppMonitor_Enable()
    • Enables Monitoring
  • VMGuestAppMonitor_MarkActive()
    • Call every 30 seconds to mark application as active
  • VMGuestAppMonitor_Disable()
    • Disable Monitoring
  • VMGuestAppMonitor_IsEnabled()
    • Returns status of Monitoring
  • VMGuestAppMonitor_GetAppStatus()
    • Returns the current application status recorded for the application, three possible values:
      • green = Virtual machine infrastructure acknowledges that the application is being monitored.
      • red = Virtual machine infrastructure does not think the application is being monitored. The
        HA monitoring agent will initialize an asynchronous reset on the virtual machine if the status is Red
      • gray = Application should send VMGuestAppMonitor_Enable again, followed
        by VMGuestAppMonitor_MarkActive, because either application monitoring failed, or the virtual machine was vMotioned to a different location
  • VMGuestAppMonitor_Free()
    • Frees the result of the *_GetAppStatus() call (only required when writing your own program)

Here is the basic workflow for using AAA within your application:

Check_if_enabled();
If not enabled, set enabled
Monitor application
If application is good, send heartbeat

Wait 15 seconds
Loop

To start using AAA functionality, you will first need to have a vSphere HA enabled cluster and enable the "VM and Application Monitoring" under VM Monitoring.

You have the ability to configure the sensitivity of AAA from Low, Medium and High which correlates to the heartbeat interval and frequency of virtual machine reboots. You also have the option of configuring your own custom policy.

Lastly, you can choose which virtual machines will be included in VM Monitoring and/or Application Monitoring.

Note: It is important to note, that HA will expect an application heartbeat to be generated every 30secs. If HA fails to receive a heartbeat within 30secs, it will transition the appHeartbeatStatus state from green to red. Depending on the configured sensitivity policy, once the heartbeat interval has been violated, HA will then restart the virtual machine. For example, if you have the sensitivity configured to medium and a heartbeat was not received within 30secs, it will change to a red state. If HA still has not received a heartbeat within 60secs of that time, then it will reboot the virtual machine.

Here is an example of installing AAA on a Linux system and compiling the C sample program:

Step 1 - Copy the AAA package to Linux system and extract the contents

Step 2 - Change into VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK/docs/samples/C/ and ensure you have gcc compiler. You may have to change the makefile if you are on a 64bit platform as it is configured by default to point to the 32bit library. When you are ready, just type "make" and you should get compiled binary called "sample" which is the sample C application

Before you run the application, you need to ensure that your shared library path variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH has been updated to include the libappmonitorlib.so. To update the variable, you will run the following command:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/full/path/to/VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK/lib64

Step 3 - You can now run the "sample" application which runs in a continuous loop and automatically enables AAA within the virtual machine and sends heartbeats to ESX(i) host. You can press control+C which then brings up three options: stop (s), disable (d), continue (c). The last two options should be pretty straight forward, but if you decide to stop the heartbeating and you don't resume, you will see HA restart the virtual machine based on your cluster configuration.

As you can see, once the heartbeats have not been received within the specified interval, HA will take action and reboot the virtual machine as expected. Here is a detail of the events as seen by vCenter and the HA cluster:

Here is an example of installing AAA on a Windows system and using the pre-compiled vmware-appmonitor binary:

Step1 - Copy the AAA package to Windows system and extract the contents 

Step 2 - Launch a cmd prompt and change into C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK-457765\VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK\bin\win64 directory. Depending if you are on a 32/64bit OS, you will need to modify the win{32,64}

Step 3 - Run the vmware-appmonitor.exe which will then provide you with options: enable, disable, markActive, isEnabled, getAppStatus

Note: The options in vmware-appmonitor for both Linux and Windows are exactly the same, this is very nice for consistency and scripting purposes. Just like with the direct use of the API, you need to first run the enable command to turn on Application monitoring and then run the markActive command which sends the heartbeats. You can always check the current heartbeat status by running getAppStatus or check whether AAA is enabled by running isEnabled command

As a reference, here are the paths to the vmware-appmonitor for both Linux and Windows:

  • VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK/bin/bin{32,64}/vmware-appmonitor
  • VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK-457765\VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK\bin\win{32,64}\vmware-appmonitor.exe

For those of you who are not into programming languages such as C,C++ and Java, here is an example using Perl. In the example, the script simulates the monitoring of an application by checking whether or not a file exists. The script starts off by creating a file that will monitored and then loops for 5 minutes and checks for the existence of the file. Once the 5 minutes are up, the script then disables Application monitoring and exits.

Note: You will need to set the two variables at the top which define the path to the shared library and the vmware-appmonitor binary.

So far we have demonstrated on how to setup AAA within the guestOS and provided a variety of programming/scripting interfaces such as C,C++, Java and Perl to integrate with your own application/script. Now what if we wanted to extract the heartbeat status for all virtual machines that have AAA implemented going through vCenter? You can easily do so by using the vSphere API and querying the appHeartbeatStatus property of your virtual machine.

I wrote a very simple vSphere SDK for Perl script getVMAppStatus.pl that allows you to query a virtual machine connecting to either vCenter or directly to an ESX(i) host to extract the heartbeat status.

Download the getVMAppStatus.pl script here.

The script can return three different status: gray, green or red and the definition for each is defined above.

Now before you jump right in and start leveraging this awesome API in either a custom application or script, you need to understand your application and various ways on detecting that it has failed and when you would like vSphere HA to reboot the virtual machine. Simply checking whether the process is running may or may not be enough.

To get more details on some of the best practices around using the Application Awareness API, I would highly recommend you check out Tom Stephens upcoming VMworld 2011 presentation TEX1928 Implementing Application Awareness in the Web Client and The Uptime Blog for more details about implementing AAA . For now, if you would like to learn more about Application Awareness API, check out last year's VMworld presentation.

How to compile a statically linked rsync binary for ESXi

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Running rsync on ESXi is not a new topic, there are a number of users in the community who have made this work. One well-known user, Dave Mishchenko, who runs vm-help and recently authored VMware ESXi: Planning, Implementation, and Security, provides an rsync binary that can be downloaded to run on ESXi. Not that I did not trust Dave and the source of his rsync binary, but I wanted to compile my own and understand the process Dave took to get to a compatible rsync for ESXi. In talking to Dave, I found out the binary was actually provided by a VMTN user, named glim who had noted some of the details in this VMTN thread.

The user basically created a statically linked versus a dynamically linked version of rsync which runs without relying on libraries that may or may not be present on ESXi. My initial attempts failed using both a 32/64bit CentOS 5.5 and latest version of rsync 3.0.7 and 3.0.3. The compilation of rsync was successful, but upon executing on ESXi, it immediately had a segmentation fault. I started to think there might be some dependencies in libraries that were used to compile rsync that I was missing. I was also in conversation with Alain Spineux, creator of MKSBackup regarding this same topic and he had found a way to compile rsync based on the article Hacking ESXi by Stjepan Groš.

Stejepan found that using CentOS 3.9, one could compile both statically and dynamically linked binaries without any modifications to ESXi. Though Stejepan did not provide the steps to compile rsync, it is relatively simple to do so. I also found that you do not need to use older 3.0.3 release of rsync, you can use the latest version which is 3.0.7 as of writing this article.

Before we get started, let me remind you of the disclaimer:
*** THIS IS PROBABLY NOT SUPPORTED BY VMWARE, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK ***

Step 1

Download and install CentOS 3.9 i386 - You can find a list of download sites here

Step 2

With a default installation of CentOS 3.9, you just need to get GCC installed

yum -y install gcc

Step 3

Next you will need to download the latest version of rsync which is 3.0.7 here and SCP it to your CentOS system

Step 4

Next you will now extract the contents of the rsync-3.0.7.tar.gz

tar -zxvf rsync-3.0.7.tar.gz

Step 5

Now you will change into the rsync-3.0.7 directory and run the configure command

./configure

Step 6

Now you will run the make command which will compile rsync, but you will also be passing in additional flags to create a statically linked binary

make CFLAGS="-static" EXEEXT="-static"

Step 7

Finally, you will need to run the strip utility which discards all symbols from object files

strip rsync-static

You now have a self-contain rsync binary labeled rsync-static found in the current working directory

Next up, you will SCP the rsync-static binary to your ESX(i) host and set the appropriate permissions to execute. I decided to temporarily store it in /tmp, but if you want the binary to persist through a reboot, you may want to store it in either a local or remote VMFS/NFS volume.

I quickly verified that rsync was in functional, by rsyncing /etc directory in ESXi over to another host. I use the following command:

/tmp/rsync-static --compress --progress --stats -e dbclient -Rr /etc build-centos:/upload

Once the file transfer has completed, you should see the /etc directory replicated on the destination host.

You may have noticed in the command line we are specifying "dbclient", by default rsync will go over SSH but ESXi does not actually have the traditional ssh client that we are all used to. It actually uses dropbear which is tiny SSH server and client which is frequently used in embedded systems such as Busybox.

Since /bin/ssh path does not exists, rsync will fail unless you specify the dbclient to the -e parameter.

Alain also found that retrieving peer name may fail and the rsync code currently does not properly handle this failure and just exits. By looking at the clientname.c source code which is part of rsync, Alain noted that even the developers left a comment that states the error could probably be handled without exiting. The fix is to just comment out the rsynerr line which does not force the program to exit when hitting this problem and this can be found on line 171.

Once you have made the changes, you just need to follow the instructions above to compile your static rsync binary. This is not necessary required, but if you run into this issue, this is a quick hack that can help.

I would like to thank Alain for sharing this tidbit of information