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While migrating a small environment to vSphere today I ran into my nemesis Host Profiles again. When are they going to Fix these things? The fact that they are incapable of even rudimentary iSCSI configuration is embarrassing. I’m sure vmware will fix it, but until then I wrote a simple one-liner that will configure iSCSI on a new host.

$VMhost = Get-VMhost 'ESX01'
$ChapUserName = 'vmware'
$ChapPassword = 'password'
$SendTargets = '192.168.1.1'            

# Enable the software ISCSI adapter if not already enabled.
$VMHostStorage = Get-VMHostStorage -VMHost $VMhost | Set-VMHostStorage -SoftwareIScsiEnabled $True            

#sleep while iSCSI starts up
Start-Sleep -Seconds 30            

# By default vSphere will set the Target Node name to iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:<HostName>-<random number> 
# This script will remove everything after the hostname, set Chap auth, and add a send Target.
#
# Example iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:esx01-165435 would become iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:esx01
$VMHostHba = Get-VMHostHba -VMHost $VMHost -Type IScsi |
    Where-object { $_.IScsiName -match "(?<IQN>iqn.1998-01.com.vmware\:[^-]+)"} |
    Set-VMHostHba -IScsiName $Matches.IQN |
    Set-VMHostHba -ChapName $ChapUserName -ChapPassword $ChapPassword -ChapType "Required" |
    New-IScsiHbaTarget -Address $SendTargets -Port "3260"                

#restart the host to make sure everything took
Restart-VMHost -VMHost $VMHost -Confirm:$false | out-null

~Glenn

More migration/upgrade stuff… As part of a larger migration strategy, I needed to migrate whole datastores. Literally Terabytes of VM data, while sVMotion did all the heavy lifting. I still needed a control script to manage this process for me. This script ran successfully for over three days on one of my larger datastores. Faithfully, moving my VM’s two by two!

$SourceDS = Get-Datastore 'VMData1'
$DestinationDS = Get-Datastore 'VMData0'
$MaxConcurrent = 2
#Keep at least 10% freespace in the datastore
$buffer = ($DestinationDS.CapacityMB * .1) * 1048576
$DestView = Get-View -VIObject $DestinationDS -Property Info
$SourceView = Get-View -VIObject $SourceDS -Property vm
 
While ($DestView.Info.FreeSpace -gt $buffer -and $SourceView.VM.count -ge 1)
{
    $SourceDS | Get-VM | Select-Object -First $MaxConcurrent | Move-VM -Datastore $DestinationDS -RunAsync | Wait-task
    $DestView.UpdateViewData("Info")
    $SourceView.UpdateViewData("Vm")
}

Honestly I completed this over a month ago, but I consider these little scripts I write to be too simple to post… My drafts folder is full of stuff like this. On the one hand I want to post for my own use, but I can search my drafts for that. So I ask you, do you get any value out of these one off solutions? Please, don’t pad my ego… If you don’t find this kind of stuff useful don’t pretend. I have my documentation, I want to know if you would like access to it?

See ya’ll at VMworld
~Glenn

As part of a larger migration I was recently given the task to copy all resource pools into new EVC enabled clusters. An already monotonous task was made worse by our use of resource pools for delegation. While it took a couple days to work out a recursion bug. The end product worked flawlessly, and successfully reproduced almost 100 resource pools across three clusters in less than 5min.

I mention the time lost because I truly believe you should “try” to script everything! In this case I lost some time, but I gained accuracy, and the ability to scale to the nth degree!

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Another itch to scratch: which vSwitch is a pNIC connected to? To solve this simple problem I created a quick perl script…

This script also lets me see the driver in use, connection speed and duplex setting, and the MAC address of the pNIC.

# Sample output:
Adaptor (Driver)        Speed (Duplex)          MAC                     vSwitch
----------------        --------------          ---                     -------
vmnic1 (bnx2)           1000 (Full)             00:00:00:00:00:00       vSwitch0
vmnic0 (tg3)            1000 (Full)             00:00:00:00:00:00       vSwitch0
vmnic3 (tg3)            1000 (Full)             00:00:00:00:00:00       vSwitch1
vmnic2 (bnx2)           1000 (Full)             00:00:00:00:00:00       vSwitch1

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I wanted get a list of port groups and their type (kernel, console, virtual machine) from a series of hosts, however the only thing I could find that was even close was a POSH script in the VMTN forums that was posted by LucD.

Using that script for inspiration, I essentially duplicated the functionality, but using the perl toolkit. This script gives me an easy to read (and parse…) list of portgroups, the vSwitch they belong to, and the type.

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Configuring a PXE server to present the files and information needed for kickstarting your ESX hosts isn’t too difficult a task. It does require some basic unix/linux knowledge, but aside from that, not too bad. I use a CentOS virtual machine with just 256 MB of RAM (you’ll need at least 512 for a GUI, but one isn’t necessary) to act as the PXE server for my ESX hosts. This same virtual machine also serves as a management point, as it has access to the management lan and with the perl toolkit and rCLI installed I can automate much of the work I need to accomplish with the hosts.

I happen to segregate the different types of traffic on the ESX hosts onto different VLANs. This means management (COS/PXE), VMotion, IP Storage, and virtual machine traffic (usually several VLANs by itself) are all separate. It is important that the server (or virtual machine) that you are using is configured with at least one interface on the same VLAN/network that the ESX management network is on. That interface will also need to have a static IP address.

It is also important that DHCP is able to function on this network when the host is in a totally unconfigured state. This means if you are trunking to your ESX hosts you must have the native VLAN set to the same as your management VLAN and port channeling (802.11q / LACP) can not be turned on during the PXE process.

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I dislike having to SSH into each host I am responsible for, and I detest having to enable SSH on ESXi (there should be NO reason for me to have to enable it). Because it’s difficult to script applying the NFS snapshot fix to a lot of hosts using the SSH method (and impossible if you don’t enable it on ESXi), I fooled around with the vifs.pl command that is provided with the rCLI.

I discovered that I can pull certain configuration files for the host using the command, modify them, then replace the configuration file…all without having to SSH to the host! vm-help.com has an excellent list of files available using this method.

All of the commands I use in the below script are available when the rCLI is installed (the rCLI also installs the perl toolkit, so all those “sample” scripts are available to us).

My windows scripting skills are non-existent, so I don’t know how to write a wrapper around the rCLI commands like I can with bash, but these same commands will work if you are using rCLI installed on Windows.

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A while back I posted about how to change the amount of RAM assigned to the COS using the SDK, however, at that time I didn’t know of a good way to do so from the command line on the box. After some digging around, testing (and consequentially breaking), I’ve discovered how to change the setting.

Turns out, someone else already knew about this (including Dominic, a.k.a vmprofessional…I swear I’ve read that kickstart file a thousand times before and never noticed the code for this)…apparently my google-fu wasn’t working for me when I was trying this before.

Remember, valid values are from 272 to 800 MB.

#!/bin/bash
# change ESX's config file
sed -i 's/memSize = "[0-9][0-9][0-9]"/memSize = "512"/' /etc/vmware/esx.conf
 
# regenerate the grub config files
esxcfg-boot -g
 
# recreate the initrd file with new settings
esxcfg-boot -b
 
echo "Host must be rebooted for new settings to take effect!"

I had the need to change the configuration of my ESX hosts so that the virtual switches had a single active and single standby adapter assigned to them. The reason for the need is rather irritating (the IBM I/O modules that we have in these particular blade centers are not really designed to handle a high amount of traffic), and it was causing some issues during vMotions.

This script allows me set the vmnics assigned to a vswitch to the desired active/standby configuration, and additionally allows me to set the port group’s vmnic active/standby policy. In my setup, I use two vSwitches, one for primary COS, vMotion and IP storage, and a second vSwitch for the virtual machines and secondary COS, each vSwitch has two NICs assigned (remember, they’re blade centers…limited network connectivity). In order to avoid vMotion taking all the bandwidth for storage I wanted to separate their traffic onto different NICs, but still provide redundancy.

The way that I accomplish this is by making the default for the vSwitch have, for example, vmnic0 active and vmnic2 standby. I then adjust the vMotion port group so that it has the opposite (vmnic2 active and vmnic0 standby). Redundancy is still present in the event of a NIC failure, but under normal circumstances, the traffic is separate.

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Edit 2009-02-09: I’ve updated the script slightly to reflect some errors that were occurring because I suck at regex.

I wanted a quick way of showing all snapshots for the VMs in vCenter using perl, so I spent a few minutes on this script. There are a lot of scripts for creating and deleting snapshots (and a couple to show them) using powershell, but not many using perl. I’m a *nix guy, so I wasn’t really interested in including the ability to send a mail to yourself or others in the script (just create a bash wrapper and use mail/mailx with a cron job) which saved me some time.

Well, after writing this script, I discovered that VMware included this functionality in their snapshotmanager.pl sample script, which is included with the Perl Toolkit.

Without further rambling by me, some perl….

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