WilliamLam.com

How to Run VMware's New Fling VisualEsxtop on Mac OS X

by // 12 Comments

The folks over at VMware Labs continue to pump out awesome new Flings and just yesterday, they released another one called VistualEsxtop, which is an enhanced version of esxtop and resxtop. It is no surprise, the Fling was developed by VMware Engineers working in the Performance group such as Priya Sethuraman, Zhelong Pan, Haiping Yang and Joanna Guan, some of which who helped develop the original esxtop utility.

VisualEsxtop can connect to directly to an ESX(i) host or a vCenter Server and provides support going all the way back to ESXi 3.5 or vCenter Server 4.0. Here is a summary of all the features for VisualEsxtop:

Features

  1. Live connection to ESX host or vCenter Server
  2. Flexible way of batch output
  3. Load batch output and replay them
  4. Multiple windows to display different data at the same time
  5. Line chart for selected performance counters
  6. Flexible counter selection and filtering
  7. Embedded tooltip for counter description
  8. Color coding for important counters

While reading the instructions, I noticed VisualEsxtop is supported on both Windows and Linux and is loaded by a simple .bat or .sh script. So I wondered if it could run on Mac OS X? Well, it turns out the script uses a utility called readlink which does not operate the same on Mac OS X and will thrown an error. However, since VisualEsxtop is just a Java application, you can manually load the VisualEsxtop and the necessary library files.

To do so, you just need to change into the visaulEsxtop directory and run the following command:

java -cp lib/vtop-ui.jar com.vmware.vtop.VTopMain

Note: For ease of use, you can even create a shell script which executes the command so you do not have to type it out each time.

You should now see visualEsxtop launch after executing the above command:

One really cool feature of VisualEsxtop is the use of color coating for important counters and issues. In the screenshot below, you can see I have a VM that is dropping packets and it is automatically highlighted for me.

I would highly recommend you check out VisualEsxtop and add this to your toolbelt of tools for troubleshooting and diagnosing performance issues in a vSphere environment! If you have any feedback or questions for the engineers, please leave them in the comment section of the VisualEsxtop Fling.

Can You Backup & Restore Apple Mac OS X Guests Using vSphere Data Protection (VDP)?

by // 1 Comment

It is really cool to see more and more customers show interest in running Apple Mac OS X on vSphere. Just the other day there was another interesting question that was raised from a customer asking whether vSphere Data Protection (VDP) would be able to backup and restore Mac OS X guests.  Apparently there is still an assumption that VMware Tools do not exist for Mac OS X guests? Perhaps virtualizing Mac OS X is still relatively new for some folks, but it is just like any other guest operating system that is supported on vSphere.

I think the following two statements should help clarify any confusion that may exist:

  • To virtualize an Apple Mac OS X guest, you need to be running vSphere on Apple hardware. This is due to a requirement in Apple's EULA and is also enforced within the vSphere platform. You can get more details in this article. 
  • VMware Tools does exist for Apple Mac OS X guests, take a look at this article for more details.

Now, if we take a look at VDP's evaluation guide on page 4 we will see the prerequisite for backing up a guest OS is pretty straight forward:

At least one virtual machine running a supported guest operating system (OS) with VMware Tools installed

Since Apple Mac OS X (10.8, 10.7, 10.6 and 10.5) is a supported guest operating system and we have VMware Tools for this operating system, then yes VDP can be used to backup and restore an Apple Mac OS X guest. To demonstrate that this actually works, I have a Mac OS X 10.7 VM running in my home lab (Apple Mac Mini which is not officially supported) and I have deployed the latest version of VDP.

I then setup the backup job for the Mac OS X guests using the super simple VDP backup wizard and then initiate a backup.

Now, let's say I accidentally fat fingered an operation and deleted this VM. Uh oh!? What am I to do? Well don't worry, VDP is there to the rescue!

To restore the VM, it is simply going through the VDP restore wizard and in just a few minutes, I  have now recovered my Mac OS X guest and it is up and running again!

I have said this many times, but it still amazes me on the number of guest operating systems vSphere supports! There really is no workload that vSphere can not virtualize! So if you have any use cases for Mac OS X workloads, rest assure you can safely virtualize it and back it up on vSphere.

Note: Though I showed using VMware VDP as the backup/recovery solution, you should also be able to leverage both VMware vSphere Replication as well as VMware Site Recovery Manager.

number of guest OSes the vSphere platform supports

VMware Tools For Apple Mac OS X Guests?

by // 3 Comments

With the release of vSphere 5, virtualizing Apple Mac OS X as a guest OS was possible and fully supported from VMware. To do so, you would need to be run ESXi on Apple hardware either the now deprecated Apple XServe 3.1 or an Apple Mac Pro. A comment that came up yesterday on Twitter was that VMware Tools did not exists for Mac OS X guests and this would make it difficult to manage Mac OS X guests on vSphere. I guess it may not be that well known or just an assumption, but VMware Tools does in fact exists for Mac OS X guests and it is also documented in the VMware Tools installation guide.

It is still amazing to me to see the number of guest OSes the vSphere platform supports and perhaps virtualizing Mac OS X is still relatively new for folks and hence the initial assumption about VMware Tools not being available. In any case, I thought I take you through a few screenshots of installing VMware Tools for a Mac OS X 10.7 guests running on my Apple Mac Mini.

In the screenshot below, we can see that VMware Tools is not detected in the guest OS and we have a option to install VMware Tools, so we go ahead and click on that.

This will mount the darwin.iso to the VM from the vmimages directory of the ESXi host and you can proceed with the VMware Tools installation.

Upon finishing the installation, you will be asked to reboot the guest OS and now when we take a look at the VM summary view, we can see VMware Tools is now running in our Mac OS X guests.

Note: For instructions on installing Apple Mac OS X as a guest OS on vSphere, please refer to this tech note.