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Tips and Tricks for vMA 5

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vMA 5 is just one of the latest VMware virtual appliances that have received the blessings and conversion to VMware's standard virtual appliance OS, SUSE. There have been several changes in the latest version of vMA and here are just a few tips and tricks that can help get you going with this new OS

1. The increase password complexity is something you may notice when you first configure vMA, if you are interested in changing it to make it easier or harder, you can take a look at the following knowledge base found on Novell's website:

2. You can now update vMA using a browser versus using the vma-update utility which is no longer being bundled with vMA 5. To access the management interface of vMA, go to your browser and type the following: https://[your-vma-hostname]:5480. You can configure a few things through the VAMI interface including updates for vMA in which you have a few options to choose from such as no updates, automatic check for updates or automatic check and install updates (just like Windows Update)

3. As with the previous versions of vMA, it has the OSP (Operating Specific) VMware Tools and the status will show up on the vSphere Client as "unmanaged". If you want to upgrade to the latest version of VMware Tools found on ESXi 5.0 to make sure of functionality such as the new integrated VIX API into the core vSphere API, you will need to run the latest VMware Tools. To do so, you will need to uninstall the OSP VMware Tools and then install the VMware Tools found in ESXi

First you will need to identify the package to uninstall and then uninstall, this can all be done at once using the following command:

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> sudo rpm -e $(rpm -qa | grep "open-vm-tools")
Stopping VMware Tools services in the virtual machine:
Guest operating system daemon: done
Virtual Printing daemon: done
Unmounting HGFS shares: done
Guest filesystem driver: done
Guest memory manager: done
VM communication interface socket family: done
VM communication interface: done
warning: /etc/vmware-tools/tools.conf saved as /etc/vmware-tools/tools.conf.rpmsave

You will need to either copy the linux.iso containing the latest version of VMware Tools from your ESXi 5 host or use the vSphere Client to install the tools. I will demonstrate how to do so from the command line using the linux.iso. You will need to copy the linux.iso over to your vMA host using the following command:

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> scp *protected email*:/vmimages/tools-isoimages/linux.iso .

Now you will mount the linux.iso to extract the VMware Tools package

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> sudo mount -o loop linux.iso /mnt/

Next we will extract the contents to /tmp

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> tar -zxvf /mnt/VMwareTools-8.5.1-380278.tar.gz -C /tmp

Then we will umount linux.iso file

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> sudo umount /mnt

We now will change into the extracted directory under /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib and perform the installation of VMware Tools

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> sudo ./vmware-install.pl

You can accept all the defaults and when it prompts you for "gcc", you can ignore that option as gcc is not available by default on vMA and after that you will see that your VMware Tools have been updated from the vSphere Client.

4. Previous version of vMA, if you are familiar with Redhat/CentOS/Fedora, you know that you can use YUM as a way to install packages from a package repository. You can do the same on SUSE, but you will need to leverage a different tool called zypper which is a command line package manage just like YUM. You can also use another tool called YaST which also uses libzypp which is zypper package management engine. In the following example I will demonstrate how to configure a repository using zypper and search and installing a package.

To get a list of repositories based on the version of SUSE, you can take a look at the following link.

To add a repository, you will use the "ar" (Add Reposistory) option specified by the URL and alias:

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> sudo zypper --gpg-auto-import-keys ar http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/ 11.1
Adding repository '11.1' [done]
Repository '11.1' successfully added
Enabled: Yes
Autorefresh: No
URI: http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/

You can add multiple repository and you can reference them by either the alias or the number assigned to the given repository

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> sudo zypper --gpg-auto-import-keys ar http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.1/ Update-11.1
Adding repository 'Update-11.1' [done]
Repository 'Update-11.1' successfully added
Enabled: Yes
Autorefresh: No
URI: http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.1/

Once you have successfully added your repository, you can view them by running the "lr" (List Repository) option

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> zypper lr
# | Alias | Name | Enabled | Refresh
--+-------------+-------------+---------+--------
1 | OS-11.1 | OS-11.1 | Yes | No
2 | Update-11.1 | Update-11.1 | Yes | No

Before you search or install packages using zypper, you will need to first refresh the repository and build the cache. To so do, you will just run the "refresh" operation

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> sudo zypper refresh
Retrieving repository '11.1' metadata [|]
New repository or package signing key received:
Key ID: B88B2FD43DBDC284
Key Name: openSUSE Project Signing Key
Key Fingerprint: 22C07BA534178CD02EFE22AAB88B2FD43DBDC284
Repository: 11.1
Do you want to reject the key, trust temporarily, or trust always? [r/t/a/?] (r): t
Retrieving repository '11.1' metadata [done]
Building repository '11.1' cache [done]
Retrieving repository 'Update-11.1' metadata [-]
New repository or package signing key received:
Key ID: B88B2FD43DBDC284
Key Name: openSUSE Project Signing Key
Key Fingerprint: 22C07BA534178CD02EFE22AAB88B2FD43DBDC284
Repository: Update-11.1
Do you want to reject the key, trust temporarily, or trust always? [r/t/a/?] (r): t
Retrieving repository 'Update-11.1' metadata [done]
Building repository 'Update-11.1' cache [done]
All repositories have been refreshed.
@opensuse.org>@opensuse.org>

Now we can search for a package using the "se" (Search) option

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> zypper se ruby

Let's say we have located ruby as the package to install, you can then run "in" (Install) operation

vi-admin@primp-dhcp-235:~> sudo zypper in ruby

You could have also done this using yast by running yast -i ruby which will then launch a graphical UI or just by running yast by itself and navigating through the UI for packages.

5. vi-logger in vMA 5 has been deprecated and removed, for a free syslog alternative take a look at this blog article: Free Linux & Windows Syslog Alternatives to depercated vi-logger in vMA 5

6. How to Change the Splash Screen In vMA

How to Automate Host Cache Configuration in ESXi 5

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ESXi 5.0 now supports a new feature called Host Cache which allows a user to offload the virtual machine's swap onto a local SSD device for performance, this can be very helpful for VMware View deployments or other VDI type deployments on vSphere 5.

Currently this is a manual process in which a VMFS volume must be created on an local SSD device and then configured to be used as a Host Cache datastore under the host configuration section. There are two ways of automating this whether this is done during the kickstart process which I am a fan of or as part of a post install process.

Method #1

In the first option, the process involves formatting and creating a VMFS volume on a local SSD devices and using a little python to connect to the vSphere MOB to perform the host cache configuration. Here is a snippet of what the kickstart would look like as part of the %firstboot section:

The script uses the partedUtil to format the local SSD and then using vmkfstools to put a VMFS volume and then finally connecting to the vSphere MOB to configure host cache.

Method #2

In the second option, I wrote a vSphere SDK for Perl script hostCacheManagement.pl using the vSphere APIs to manage and configure host cache datastores after an ESXi 5 host has been built. The script supports three options: list, enable and disable and will also validate that datastore being specified are SSD datastores.

Download the hostCacheManagement.pl script here.

Here is an example of listing all SSD datastores and whether or not they are being used for host caching:

Here is an example of enabling an SSD datastore for host cache:

Note: Make sure your "--swapsize" is less than or equal to the size of your SSD datastore else an error will be thrown. VMFS does take up some space for its metadata/etc.

Here is an example of disabling an SSD datastore for host cache:

Here is an example if you try to specify a non-SSD datastore, an error will be thrown:

New vSphere 5 CLI Utilities/Tricks Marketing Did Not Tell You About Part 3

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Continuing from New vSphere 5 CLI Utilities/Tricks Marketing Did Not Tell You About Part 2

15. Another way to run dcui utility is using the dcuiweasel, I'm not exactly sure what the difference between this and dcui utility, but I suspect it has something to do with weasel also loaded.

16. You can run gdbserver for debugging processes, I suspect this maybe for VMware engineers/support to use.

17. To view/modify the security policy under /etc/vmware/secpolicy including VMCI modifications you can use the secpolicytools 

18. Networking details about the various filters can be viewed using summarize-dvfilter utility

19. There are two utilities that deal with managing devices but doesn't have a whole lot of help are vmkdevmgr and vmkmkdev. I suspect these may be as useful as this other vmk* utility (vmkchdev) but I haven't explored either utility

20. If you have VMkernel or VM core dumps, you can use this nifty utility vmkdump_extract to extract various bits of information including the logs within the core dump. This tool may come in very handy for troubleshooting purposes

21. There is a new esxcfg-* command that is only available in ESXi Shell called esxcfg-fcoe which as you can guess from the name allows you to manage and configure your FCoE devices. 

~ # esxcfg-fcoe
No action provided
esxcfg-fcoe []

Where is one of:

-d|--discover=vmnicX [] Initiate FCoE adapter discovery on the given NIC
-r|--remove-adapter=vmhbaXYZ Destroy the specified FCoE adapter
-x|--deactivate-nic=vmnicW Deactivate FCOE configuration for given NIC
-l|--list-vnports List discovered VNPorts associated with this host
-N|--list-fcoe-nics List FCoE-capable NICs with detailed information
-n|--compact-list-fcoe-nics List FCoE-capable NICs each on a single line,
with limited information
-e|--enable Enable an FCoE-capable NIC if it is disabled
-D|--disable Disable an FCoE-capable NIC if it is enabled (requires
reboot to take effect)
-h|--help Show this message

And are a set of:

-p|--priority=[0-7] Priority class to use for FCoE traffic
-v|--vlan=id VLAN ID to use for FCoE traffic
-a|--macaddress=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx MAC address to use for the underlying FCoE controller

Examples:

To discover FCoE adapters on a given NIC, using default settings
esxcfg-fcoe -d vmnicX

To discover FCoE adapters on a given NIC, specifying only MAC address
esxcfg-fcoe -d vmnicX -a MA

To discover FCoE adapters on a given NIC, specifying all settings
esxcfg-fcoe -d vmnicX -p priority -v vlan -a MA

To remove an FCoE adapter
esxcfg-fcoe -r vmhbaXYZ

To enable FCoE for a given NIC, specifying bandwidth and MAC address
esxcfg-fcoe -e vmnicX -a MA

To disable FCoE for a given NIC
esxcfg-fcoe -D vmnicX

To deactivate FCoE for a given NIC
esxcfg-fcoe -x vmnicX

22. For more details on hbrfilterctl check out the blog post here

23. For more details on apply-host-profiles, applyHostProfile, esxhpcli and esxhpedit check out the blog post here.

24. On VCVA (vCenter Virtual Appliance) you can quickly list the port configuration by running the following command:

vcenter50-2:~ # /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/py/vccfg.py -v defaults
VC_ROOT_SSH=yes
VC_PORT_QS_HTTPS=10443
VC_ESXI_AUTODEPLOY_MAX_SIZE=2
VC_PORT_NETDUMPER=6500
VC_ESXI_NETDUMPER_DIR_MAX=2
VC_PORT_HTTPS=443
VC_PORT_WEB_SVC_HTTPS=8443
VC_PORT_HEARTBEAT=902
VC_PORT_AUTODEPLOY=6502
VC_PORT_LDAP=389
VC_PORT_SYSLOG=514
VC_PORT_QS_HTTP=10080
VC_PORT_WEB_SVC_HTTP=8080
VC_PORT_HTTP=80
VC_PORT_SYSLOG_SSL=1514
VC_PORT_QS_XDB=10109
VC_CFG_RESULT=0