Hot on the release of vSphere 5, Scott Lowe has released an update to one of the best general vSphere books on the market, Mastering VMware vSphere 5.

Pre-Review

I pulled down the kindle edition of this one about a week ago and moving through at a pretty good clip and wanted to share my thoughts so far.

This book is an excellent follow-up to Mastering VMware vSphere 4 and Scott provides a good number of call outs where vSphere 5.x deltas from prior versions as well as real world tips for having to manage both versions. As Scott did in the vSphere 4 edition, Scott begins by covering vSphere 5 basics and features, moves into planning, and then the installation of vSphere 5. Beyond that he moves into working with networking, HA, and security. From there he moves into day-to-day administration and finally automation. It’s an easy to read, detailed overview and general introduction to vSphere that would be a benefit to anyone who will be managing a vSphere environment.

TL;DR – If you work in a vSphere environment, you should have yourself a copy of this book.

Obligatory Amazon link.

No really, it is seriously awesome. Eric Sloof from NTPRO.nl has published a video that runs you through a little utility he wrote called “vmFilemanager”, then further shows you how to create such a utility using the free edition of Visual Basic 2008.

Online Training – Automating vSphere with the VIX API from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

For more VIX goodness you can check out my past posts on VIX, as well as dive into this link provided by William Lam, http://bit.ly/dAm5NW

Growing up in VI3 I became accustomed to using the default inventory view. While effective for most tasks, you miss out on quite a bit of what the interface has to offer. What so i mean? Take this question for example: “What is my storage capacity, and how much of that do I have provisioned?”

Simple enough, you check the most recent copy of your inventory spreadsheet (or it’s analog) and spit out the answer. Oh… you don’t have one? Was it last updated in the eighties? Let’s poke on the vSphere Client interface to find the answer:

Change your inventory view to “Datastores”

You’ll then see a screen similar to this:

In summary, my 50GB datastore has 60GB provisioned and 35GB free. Selecting the “Virtual Machines” tab, you get a good break down on a per VM basis:

Hope you found this useful.

The ever wonderful Virtu-Al has released an update to his PowerShell Daily report. This script is beyond awesome in usefulness and should be required in any production VI deployment. Really, it is that good. Also! There have been some mods to get it looking nice on the iPhone.

What is new in V2?

• Bug Fixes
• Active VMs count
• Inactive VMs count
• DRS Migrations count and list
• Correct NTP Server check for each host
• VMs stored on local datastores
• NTP Service check for each host
• vmkernel warning messages for each host
• VM CPU ready over x%

So the big news last week was that VMware decided it’s time to rename VMware Virtual Infrastructure (or VI as the peeps on the street are calling it these days) to VMware vSphere. The current version seems to be staying on the VI title and the next version will move to this odd naming structure.

So far they’ve renamed a LOT of their products, Virtual Center became vCenter Server, VDI became VMware View, and many of the other DC level products moved into the VMware vCenter group.

So far some of the theories on why oh why VMware decided to confuse us all with renaming everything (some marketing itch no doubt) seem to surround brand protection and separating the name from other vendors now in the same space (Hyper-V and Hypervisor for example)

Pretty much everyone has blogged about it so far, so we’re the last on the boat, but Cody’s not here and I’m getting old.

Patrick

Since my first few posts on this got a bit of attention, I thought I’d add some more to this. In today’s post we’ll cover adding or deleting a route, and setting a default route. I’ve got requests for others that will keep the next few weeks worth of VIX posts busy.

We’ll cover this against both a Windows and a Linux guest, because well… VIX is flexible like that. Remember, if you have any trouble, check that your VMware Tools are running, your command syntax is correct, and that you have the right user & password settings.

On Windows:

Traditionally this would be done by logging into the guest OS, and running one of the following commands:

Adding:
Temporary Route: route add 192.168.100.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.15.1 1
Permanent Route: route add -p 192.168.100.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.15.1 1

Deleting:
route delete 192.168.100.0

Doing this in VIX is as simple as:

Before:

Adding:
vmrun -T esx -h https://esx/sdk -u cody.bunch -p password -gu guest.user -gp guest.password runProgramInGuest "[datastore] vm/vmx.vmx" c:\windows\system32\route.exe add -p 192.168.100.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.15.1

Deleting:
vmrun -T esx -h https://esx/sdk -u cody.bunch -p password -gu guest.user -gp guest.password runProgramInGuest "[datastore] vm/vmx.vmx" c:\windows\system32\route.exe delete 192.168.100.0

Setting the default was accomplished back in our setting the IP address post.

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VIX>vmrun -T esx -h https://esx.example.com/sdk -u nerv\cody.bunch -p apassword -gu Administrator -gp anotherpassword  runProgramInGuest “[sanstorage1] test/test.vmx” c:\windows\system32\netsh int ip set address “Local Area Connection” static 192.168.15.25 255.255.255.0 192.1

On Linux

On Linux, where my knowledge is quite limited, I’ve come to understand (thanks Google) that it’s as simple as the “route add –net” commands to add and delete routes. I did find however, that for making this route persistent, can vary across distro of choice, and thus I’ve not included it here.

Adding:
route add –net 192.168.100.0/24 gw 192.168.15.1

Deleting:
route del –net 192.168.100.0/24 gw 192.168.15.1

In VIX:

Before:

Adding:
vmrun -T esx -h http://dc01.nerv.local/sdk -u user -p password -gu root -gp rootpassword runProgramInGuest "[Local
Storage] shell.nerv.local/shell.nerv.local.vmx" /sbin/route add -net 192.168.10
0.0/24 gw 192.168.15.1

Deleting:
vmrun -T esx -h http://dc01.nerv.local/sdk -u user -p password -gu root -gp rootpassword runProgramInGuest "[Local
Storage] shell.nerv.local/shell.nerv.local.vmx" /sbin/route add -net 192.168.10
0.0/24 gw 192.168.15.1

See!

My new best friend? You can’t tell me who my friends are! That is not allowed! Who is this rCLI fellow and how dare you make such a claim!

Well, the rCLI, better known as “VMware Infrastructure Remote CLI”

The VMware Infrastructure Remote CLI provides a command-line interface for datacenter management from a remote server. This interface is fully supported on ESX 3.5 Update 2 and ESXi Update 2.

Cool, so what?

So what? I’ll tell you what. This gets to be another of the many tools in your VMware admin toolkit. It is especially useful for doing things like… managing ESXi remotely in the same fashion you would the ESX service console. Further, it makes all of it’s calls via the API. Giving you a single point to manage ESX and ESXi, and to do only those things you can from the CLI (esxtop anyone?). It comes in three flavors, a Windows installable, a Linux installable, a virtual appliance.

In fact, while you download it, and read a bit of the manual, I’ll spin up a quick example of just how cool it really is:

Below is an example of how to list all nic’s on an esx host, as well as delete a vSwitch. Enjoy!

Listing of available commands

esxcfg-nics –l

esxcfg-vswitch –l

esxcfg-vswitch –d then esxcfg-vswitch -l

so, Veeam the purveyors of all things shiny like Veeam Backup, Veeam Reporter, etc… They’re feeling nice and keeping the holiday cheer going! So sign up here Veeam XMAS Freebie! No idea what it’ll end up being, but here’s the clue:

‘If you liked FastSCP, you’ll love this’

Patrick

As a demonstration of the power of VIX, I’ve chosen to show you how to change IP addresses of a Windows VM. You may want to buckle up for this.

First, grab the VIX API installable from VMware’s site. In this case we’ll be using the Windows version (because that is the VM I happen to be writing this post from). The install is quick and puts all the files into “%PROGRAMFILES%\VMware\VMware VIX”.

Lets get our command prompt open:

Cool, now lets check the IP of our Windows VM:

Now, lets change it:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VIX>vmrun -T esx -h https://esx.example.com/sdk -u nerv\cody.bunch -p apassword -gu Administrator -gp anotherpassword  runProgramInGuest “[sanstorage1] test/test.vmx” c:\windows\system32\netsh int ip set address “Local Area Connection” static 192.168.15.25 255.255.255.0 192.168.15.1

(That is all one line, the blog wrapped it)

Now for the lovely error!

Not rightly sure on that one. I’ve opened an SR for it. We’ll see how it goes.

This has been reported by vm/etc and vinternals, but I think it deserves quite a bit more attention. Take a moment to read the posts. The free version of ESXi Update 3 now supports read/write FULL remote admin via the RCLI, and the other api’s. Meaning, that VMware took and made it just that much cooler.  Thanks!