Removing SCVMM from vCenter

An interesting article was bought to my attention which explains that if you ever use SCVMM to control your VMware environment (no comment) and then decide to remove it again (again no comment) there are a few things left behind.

The following blog explains what is left behind and whats better it even gives you a nice powershell script to remove the leftovers, good job !

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 makes several changes to your vCenter environment that you may like to know about, especially since they don’t seem to be mentioned in the product documentation. It’s also worth pointing out that none of these changes are reverted when you subsequently decide to discontinue managing vCenter with SCVMM.

Read the rest of the article here

List VM’s with RDM

I was asked if it was possible to list all VM’s with Raw Disk Mappings on twitter, a quick search of the VI Toolkit community showed that LucD had already achieved this, I have copied the code below for reference:

Connect-VIServer MYVISERVER
$report = @()$vms = Get-VM | Get-View
foreach($vm in $vms){ 
foreach($dev in $vm.Config.Hardware.Device){   
if(($dev.gettype()).Name -eq "VirtualDisk"){     
if($dev.Backing.CompatibilityMode -eq "physicalMode"){
 $row = "" | select VMName, HDDeviceName, HDFileName
 $row.VMName = $vm.Name
 $row.HDDeviceName = $dev.Backing.DeviceName
 $row.HDFileName = $dev.Backing.FileName
 $report += $row
 }   } }}$report

Powershell V2 CTP3

They said it would be December and Microsoft actually kept a deadline… Only Just !

Powershell V2 CTP3 was released last night after several hints from @jsnover on twitter.

To download the latest Community Technology Preview here

Selected New and Updated Features in Windows PowerShell V2 CTP3

  • PowerShell Remoting
  • Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)
  • 63 New Cmdlets
  • Modules
  • Script Debugging
  • Advanced Functions
  • PowerShell Class API

    • Veeam Monitor 3.0 Free Edition

    The guys over at Veeam have released an early Christmas present for us all and its a cracker (sorry).

    Head over to the Veeam site now to get your free copy of Veeam Monitor 3.0. Very useful for monitoring ESX3i

    The Veeam Monitor Free Edition is an easy-to-use VMware monitoring solution designed to meet the day-to-day needs of VMware administrators who need real-time performance monitoring and alerting. Built from the ground up specifically for the virtual world, Veeam Monitor provides a bird’s-eye view of key performance metrics across your virtual ESXi infrastructure.

    With Veeam Monitor, you can view real-time resource usage data for any virtual infrastructure object or collection of objects, as well as known infrastructure events, all on a single screen. This allows you to finally see your virtual infrastructure as a unified entity, not just a collection of isolated hosts and guests.

    Veeam Monitor provides comprehensive data on resource consumption and workload, from VirtualCenter, or ESX and ESXi hosts all the way down to the individual virtual machine level. Detailed real-time statistics are provided for key parameters critical to the health of the virtual environment, such as CPU and memory usage, disk and network I/O, and swap usage. Real-time data for multiple VI objects can be viewed in a convenient consolidated view for each ESX host, resource pool or cluster. This speeds up analysis and troubleshooting, and helps you identify potential resource bottlenecks faster than is possible using the Virtual Infrastructure Client.

    • Correlation of event and performance data

    Veeam Monitor helps you understand how virtual infrastructure activities affect your VM performance, and solve resource usage mysteries with real-time monitoring graphs displaying known virtual infrastructure events, such as VMotion, snapshot creation and deletion, or backup activities, directly on the performance graphs.

    • User interface optimized for monitoring

    The Veeam Monitor user interface was designed and optimized specifically for monitoring tasks. You can switch easily between different views to quickly find the VMware Infrastructure component you are looking for, or you can perform an integrated search. Drill down to an individual VM and find out how much CPU and memory it is consuming, and even connect to the VM console – all right from the Monitor user interface. Find out at a glance which components of your VMware infrastructure are the largest resource consumers: the Tops section of Veeam Monitor helps you identify which virtual machines are consuming the most CPU, memory, disk I/O and network resources.

    • Advanced alerting and flexible alarms

    Veeam Monitor provides comprehensive alerting with custom alarms that can be based on many sources. You can easily set up e-mail notifications or SNMP traps for important events such as a given number of running VMs is exceeded, VM heartbeat is lost, a specific event is generated by VirtualCenter etc. Being alerted on such events allows for faster administrator response to critical issues, helping you to maintain better health and uptime of your virtual infrastructure. The Free Edition allows you to set and use up to ten alarms.

    • Scalable architecture

    Veeam Monitor is an enterprise-level client-server application that enables multi-admin access to performance data without affecting ESX server and VirtualCenter performance or changing your access policies. It gathers all performance information into a local or remote SQL database, allowing users to access infrastructure-wide performance data and reporting as needed. While you are using the Free Edition, this data is still gathered, so that if you later choose to upgrade to the full Veeam Monitor, you will have access to this historical data for capacity planning, chargeback and trend analysis.

    • Support for multiple VirtualCenters

    Veeam Monitor can be optionally integrated with VMware VirtualCenter to provide cluster-aware monitoring of your virtual machines. Veeam Monitor supports and extends VMware’s management framework, offloading the monitoring burden from VirtualCenter for enhanced VC performance. And with support for consolidating performance data from multiple VirtualCenters, Veeam Monitor shows performance data from your entire virtual infrastructure on a single screen – no matter how large your VMware deployment is.

    • Easy to deploy and use

    While providing you truly enterprise-scale architecture, Veeam Monitor has extremely low system requirements comparing to other VMware monitoring solutions. Veeam Monitor takes minutes to deploy and use in any size environment. Installation package contains everything you need to start using the software right away, minutes after you download it!

    • Simple upgrade to the full version

    New VMWare Powerpack for PowerGui

    WOW!

    Kirk Munro has really done a job on the VMWare Power pack for PowerGui, if your new to powershell or even if your not, download it now, this will really change the way you work and allow you to get more information out of your Virtual Infrastructure.

    Subscribe to updates to the PowerPack Library if you want to be notified whenever a PowerPack is published or updated (includes documentation updates), or watch the Poshoholic blog for news.

    Supported features:

    • Management of multiple VMware Virtual Center, ESX, ESXi and VMware Server hosts when using the VMware VI Toolkit 1.0 release
    • Management of multiple VMware Virtual Center, ESX and ESXi hosts when using the VMware VI Toolkit 1.5 release
    • Single sign-on to multiple hosts using the same credentials
    • Ability to browse through inventory hierarchies on Virtual Center
    • Ability to view topological data for any managed server
    • Management of datacenters, clusters, resource pools, hosts, folders, virtual machines, templates, snapshots, networks, datastores, files, tasks and log files

    Latest Version:

    December 19, 2008 (2.0.0)


    – reorganized the PowerPack structure to facilitate easier management of multiple hosts and to allow users to retrieve objects from one or more of the hosts they are managing whether they are already connected or not
    – added support for browsing the VMware Inventory hierarchy (includes Hosts and Clusters, Virtual Machines and Templates, Networks and Datastores), including being able to browse directly into the file system on the datastores
    – added many new links and actions
    – exposed many more VMware Infrastructure objects through topological views and through integration in the hierarchy
    – improved the performance of many nodes, links and actions
    – added single sign-on support (note that connecting to multiple hosts using the same username but different passwords is currently not supported, but we are working on that and will provide support for this soon)
    – tested management against Virtual Center 2.0, ESX 3.0x and 3.5, ESXi 3.5 and Virtual Server 2.0 (note: management of Virtual Center 2.0 requires version 1.0 of the VMware VI Toolkit)
    – and more!

    Extra fields in the VI Client

    How would you like extra fields in the VI Client, maybe a field for if the VM has a snapshot or even the host hardware model or ESX version. Well now you can.

    Hugo Peters has been creating some amazing scripts which put data back into the VI Client for you to use, check out his posts:

    Add Snapshot Information to the VI Client using Powershell

    Add Custom Fields to VI Client with Powershell (Samples)

    Great work Hugo.

    PrimalForms Example (Virtual Center Log)


    Fatbeard (don’t ask as I don’t know) has been reading my blog, he saw the VI Toolkit script I produced for getting events out of the virtual center database and has put a nice GUI on top of the whole thing to create a really nice usable app.

    If you haven’t seen PrimalForms yet and are using powershell I suggest you check it out, it basically creates all the code you need to create a GUI for your powershell scripts. 
    Check out his great example here

    Top 10 PowerShell Scripts

    Eric Siebert has published his list of the Top 10 PowerShell scripts that VMware administrators should use there are some good ones on here that are worth checking out, can’t believe I made number 2 !  Thanks Eric.

     

    2  Report into MS Word

    http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-7070

    A script from Alan Renouf that provides a report in Microsoft Word of the virtual machines in your environment with graphs and pie charts.

    Microsoft NLB Error when trying to Cluster Cloned VM’s

    After configuring a few NLB VM’s recently on VMware I was intrigued when one of the people I follow on twitter was having issues with cloned NLB’s, SimonLong_ kindly agreed to document the details so I could blog about it and share his experience……

    My Job; Cluster 2 VM’s using Microsoft NLB, a simple 2 minute job right? Wrong!

    Why? Because my 2nd VM was a clone of the 1st.

    Once I had my newly created VM’s configured I proceeded to fire up the NLB Manager tool and began to create my new cluster. Cluster configured…first VM added to the cluster, no problems.

    Then I tried to add the 2nd VM… I was confronted with this Error:

    “No interfaces are available for installing a new cluster”

    clip_image001

    Great there goes my lunch break!

    After a little Googling I come across this MS Support article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/828258

    Because I had cloned the 2nd VM this meant that the Network Adapters on both VM’s had identical GUID’s in the registry and apparently NLB isn’t a fan of matching GUID’s.

    There are two ways I found to fix this;

    1. The Lazy way (which I first used)
    2. My Recommend solution found here (which I now use, when I realised that I was being a Cowboy).

    Solution 1

    • Add a second NIC to either VM that your trying to cluster
    • Remove the configuration and Disable the primary NIC
    • Configure the second NIC

    You should now be able to add both VM’s to the NLB Cluster.

    Solution 2

    • On either VM enter “Device Manager”
    • Expand “Network Adapters” and right mouse click on the Network adapter that you are trying to add to the NLB configuration.
    • Select ‘Uninstall’. NIC has now been uninstalled.
    • Next you want to re-add the network card which in turn will create a new GUID for it. Do this by right mouse clicking your servers name at the top of the ‘Device Manager’ list and select ‘Scan for hardware changes’. This will now re-detect the NIC and give it a new GUID.
    • Now exit out of “Device Manager”
    • Re-configure the NIC

    You should now be able to add both VM’s to the NLB Cluster.

    Now that I was able to add the VM into the cluster I did receive the following errors;

    · Could not read configuration of interface "{DF52417D-E337-4543-A223-8D17514E02BC}": error 0x800706ba

    · Update 2 failed with error 0x800706ba

    Ignore it the VM still seems to converge fine into the cluster.

    Detailed VMware Host Network Information

    Following my previous script ‘Extracting Cisco Discovery Protocol Info‘ I decided to tidy up the script, give a more controlled output and add a few items to the output.

    The following script will add some nice host network information into an object which is exported to a csv file for passing to the network guys or can be used to find your server in that mess of cables that are always meaning to be tidied in the data center.

    You will get:

    • Host,
    • Physical Nic Name
    • Speed
    • MAC
    • Switch Device ID
    • Port ID
    • Observed Network ranges
    • VLAN’s