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How to Update vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) After Changing vCenter Server IP Address

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If vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) is deployed in your environment and you change the IP Address of the vCenter Server, VIN will no longer function even after a reboot. The reason for this is that when VIN first registers with the vCenter Server, information is generated and stored within VIN such as the IP Address as well as security thumbprint. Since the IP Address of the vCenter Server has changed, we simply just need to re-register VIN with the vCenter Extension vService.

In my lab I have VIN deployed and connected to a vCenter Server (note the IP Address 172.30.0.229):

I then update the vCenter Server's IP Address to 172.30.0.230 which will break communication with VIN. To resolve this, start off by shutting down the VIN appliance. Once it is shutdown, edit the settings and click on "Manage->vServices" and at the bottom click on the Edit button. Next change the Provider drop down to "No Provider" and then click OK.

Now we will reset the Provider back to the vCenter Extension vService by going through the same workflow again but now selecting "vCenter Extension vService" as the provider.

You will also notice at the bottom there is a validation message and you should also see the new IP Address of your vCenter Server. Once you are done, click OK to save the settings and then power back on your VIN appliance. Once VIN is up, connect to the vSphere Web Client and you should be able to see your VIN data again!

VIN 2.0 Supports New Export to CSV & Maps Feature

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VMware just released the new vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 this evening which includes all new updates to the following products:

There are too many cool new features in each of these products to list them all out (I recommend you check out the release notes for each product). Though, two new features that I would like to point out is from latest vSphere Infrastructure Navigator 2.0 release (also known as VIN) which allows you to export the VIN data to CSV output as well as exporting the maps to PNG.

You have the option of exporting all virtual machines from a given vCenter Server or filter out a subset of the virtual machines by navigating to a specific object using the object navigator in the vSphere Web Client. In the screenshot below, I would like to export all virtual machines that VIN is collecting for a particular vSphere Cluster, so I select the Virtual Machines in that Cluster on the left and then select the Manage tab and then click on Application Services.

The export to CSV button is located right next to the filter box and this will export the entire table view that is seen to a CSV file which you can then save onto your local desktop. The filename will automatically be saved as vin-inventory.csv and here is a screenshot of the output file:

Note: If you filter the list of virtual machines using the Filter box, the export will still capture all virtual machines under this view. If you wish to capture a specific set of VMs, you will need to use the object navigator to filter out the specific objects before exporting.

To export the application dependency maps from VIN, you will need to be in the context of an individual virtual machine and again under Manage tab and then click on Application Services. The map export button is located right next to the zoom in/out option in the upper right corner as shown in the screenshot below.

I really like map export feature as you can sit back and let VIN do all the hard work of mapping out all the applications and VM dependencies for us in a graphical manner and then just export the picture which can then be used with documentation, CMDB diagrams, auditing, etc. These are just two out of the many new features found in the latest release of VIN 2.0. I highly recommend you give VIN a try if you are not already using it in your vSphere environment!

One additional note that I would like to point out, the data being exported to CSV does not capture all the application details such as the services, ports, processes, etc. that you might see from the VIN UI. If you wish to extract all this information from VIN for your own use, you can do so by taking a look at the following articles:

Alternative Way of Extracting VIN (vSphere Infrastructure Navigator) Information

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Here is an alternative method of extracting the super useful information from VIN (vSphere Infrastructure Navigator) which I stumbled across while troubleshooting an earlier VIN 1.2 deployment. This method is much simpler from a data extraction point of view and has less prerequisites compared to the first method documented here and here, but it does require a bit more data processing.

Once VIN is up running, there are a set of zip files that are created in /var/log/vadm/results which are name with the virtual machines MoRef ID. We can quickly view the contents of one of these files (without needing to extract the zip file) by using zcat, here is the command to view one of the zip files: zcat /var/logs/vadm/vm-238.zip

From the screenshots above, we can see it contains the same set of information as displayed in the VIN UI. The information is broken down into several section including high level summary of the VM, individual processes running in the virtual machine, application/services known by VIN as well as a netstat table.

Instead of operating on these files directly, you should make a separate copy of the directory for further processing. Since the file name contains the VM's MoRef ID instead of the human readable VM display name, I wrote a quick script called extractVINData.sh which creates a copy of data and rename the files to VM display name.

To use the script, you just need to download it and upload it to your VIN appliance (make sure you set the execute permission on the script). Then just run the script and it will automatically copy the directory to /root/vin-results and translate the VM MoRef ID by correlating with the /var/log/vadm/engine.log file.

Here is a screenshot of the script output:

So if you do not mind some parsing, you can easily extract the data VIN is collecting by simply SSHing to the VIN appliance and periodically copying out /var/log/vadm/results directory. From my quick test, this directory is automatically updated as new VMs are brought online and inventoried by VIN.