Search Results for: kickstart

Ghetto Reflections 2011

12.24.2011 by William Lam // 14 Comments

I can not believe it is that time of the year again! 2011 was a great year for myself and looking back, a lot has changed both in my professional and personal life. As 2011 starts to wind down, here are some interesting stats for this past year.

Total number of posts on virtuallyGhetto in 2011: 103

Total ghettoVCB pageviews: 600,000k (almost 300k more than 2010)

Here were the top 10 blog posts of 2011 by page views:

Here were the top 10 ghetto scripts of 2011 by page views:

Lastly, I want to take this time to thank all our readers for all of your support! If you already gotten this far into the post, you are in for a surprise. I will be giving away a free copy of Duncan Epping & Frank Denneman's VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive colored copy. I received a signed copy from the gurus themselves for an article I wrote awhile back and ended up with two copies. To qualify, you just need to leave a comment with a valid email address. I will randomly select a winner on Dec 30th, 2011.

Happy Holidays and have a Happy New Year! See you in 2012.

UPDATE: Please take a look at this blog post for the winner The Winner Is ...

Ghetto webAccess for ESXi

12.12.2011 by William Lam // 14 Comments

I got the idea for this post a few months back after noticing several questions on the VMTN forums on how to enable webAccess for ESXi. With ESXi, the webAccess interface is no longer available as it was with classic ESX. After seeing the question and randomly browsing through the various flings on VMware Labs, I noticed an interesting fling called Ops Panel for ESX. Ops Panel provides a simple javascript that leverages the vSphere MOB to perform basic power operations for virtual machines and it is loaded onto the homepage of a classic ESX host remotely using Greasemonkey.

I immediately wondered if I could run the javascript directly on an ESX or ESXi host without the use of Greasemonkey. With a quick tweak of the default index.html homepage, I was able to get a simple "ghetto" webAccess running on both an ESX and ESXi host. I also ran into several bugs, one that dealt with how the power state of a virtual machines was being captured by the differences in the ESX(i) 4.0, 4.1 and 5.0 APIs and a recent fix to a CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) vulnerability in ESX(i) 4.1 Update 1 that made it difficult to get Ops Panel running on more than just ESX(i) 4.0.

I reached out to the fling creator Ivan Donchev and he was kind enough to help assist me in the issues I ran into and also provided an updated version of his script to properly handle both the power state and the CSRF workaround. He recently published an update to his script a few weeks back supporting both ESX 4 and ESXi 5 but missed ESX(i) 4.1 support due to limited amount of testing. This was an easy fix and I modified the script to include support for ESX(i) 4.1 and also changed the default power off operation to a guestOS shutdown. The modified version of the script can be downloaded here.

When you browse to the homepage of your ESX(i) host using the browser, you will be prompted to login which require the same credentials as if you were to login to the host directly using the vSphere Client or vSphere MOB.

Once you have logged in, it will search for all virtual machines running on the host and generate the list of virtual machines and their respective power states.

You can then perform the appropriate power operation such as a power on, shutdown or suspend using the icons on the right. This can be really useful if you don't have access to vCenter Server, vSphere Client or SSH access to the host but just have a web browser.

To load the Ops Panel script on an ESX(i) host, you will need to do the following:

Note: These instructions are applicable for both ESX and ESXi, but with ESXi, it is important that the commands to copy both the modified index.html and Ops Panel script to docroot are executed as changes are not persisted after a reboot for ESXi hosts.

You can also add this to your kickstart file by appending the lines above in your %firstboot stanza so you automatically get Ops Panel after install. Though this will not give you a full webAccess that classic ESX did but it definitely is a useful way to quickly get to your virtual machines and perform simple power operations using a web browser.

How to Automate the disabling of the VAAI UNMAP primitve in ESXi 5

10.01.2011 by William Lam // 5 Comments

I just saw an interesting article on Jason Boche's blog about VMware's recall of the new VAAI UNMAP primitive for vSphere 5. VMware released a new KB article KB2007427 documenting the details along with a recommendation to disable the VAAI UNMAP primitive for now (a patch will be released in the future to automatically disable this until the issue is resolved).

One thing that caught my in the VMware KB article is to disable the VAAI UNMAP primitive, you need to manually login to ESXi 5 Tech Support Mode (SSH) to run the local version of esxcli command. This is trivial if you have several hosts, but it can be time consuming if you have several hundred hosts to manage. Even though the "VMFS3.EnableBlockDelete" is a hidden parameter that can not be seen using any of the supported utilities, you can enable and disable the property using the remote version of esxcli which is part of vMA 5 or vCLI 5.

Here is an example of the command when connecting directly to an ESXi 5 host:

esxcli --server himalaya.primp-industries.com --username root system settings advanced set --int-value 1 --option /VMFS3/EnableBlockDelete

Here is an example of command when connecting to vCenter Server:

esxcli --server reflex.primp-industries.com --vihost himalaya.primp-industries.com --username administrator system settings advanced set --int-value 1 --option /VMFS3/EnableBlockDelete

As you can see, you can easily wrap this in a simple for-loop to disable the VAAI UNMAP primitive. So here is a script to help with exactly that called vaaiUNMAP.sh

The script accepts 4 parameters:

A list of ESXi 5 hosts to enable or disable VAAI UNMAP primitive
Name of the vCenter Server managing the ESXi 5 hosts
vCenter auth file which contains the username/password
0 to disable or 1 to enable VAAI UNMAP primitive

The auth file is just a file that contains the following:

VI_USERNAME=administrator
VI_PASSWORD=y0mysuperdupersecurepassword

Here is an example of disabling VAAI UNMAP primitive on 3 ESXi hosts being managed by a vCenter Server:

To help extract all ESXi 5 hosts from your vCenter Server, you can use the following vSphere SDK for Perl getESXi5Hosts.pl

Here is an example of running the script and just save the output to a file:

One of the unfortunate thing about the VMFS3.EnableBlockDelete is that it is a hidden parameter along with others, so it will not automatically display when using local or remote ESXCLI, but thanks to Craig Risinger, you can still get the information using the remote ESXCLI by specifying the --option parameter which is great because you do not need to login to the ESXi Shell to retrieve the information.

esxcli --server himalaya.primp-industries.com --username root system settings advanced list --option /VMFS3/EnableBlockDelete

I would also recommend adding an entry into your ESXi 5 kickstart to automatically disable VAAI UNMAP by default until a fix is released.

%firstboot --interpreter=busybox

#disable VAAI UNMAP primitive
esxcli system settings advanced set --int-value 0 --option /VMFS3/EnableBlockDelete