DPM or Distributed Power Management is the power saving function of VMware’s DRS. I’ll not go into too much on configuring it here, as that’s quite thoroughly covered elsewhere (Those are 3 different links). I will show you, however, quickly how to test it. Why? Well, there are a few times when you’d want to do this, say: before adding a new host to a cluster, creating a DPM cluster from scratch, or say, taking a VMware exam.

Testing DPM

Connect-VIServer util.provmware.local
Get-VMHost -Name “esxi02*” | Suspend-VMHost -Confirm:$false
Get-VMHost -Name “esxi02*” | Start-VMHost -Confirm:$false

What this does is suspend and power a host on to verify DPM will be able to take the same actions.

It’s Alastair here, today I am very pleased to release the vSphere 5 AutoLab, a free tool for the VMware community.

What is the AutoLab?

The AutoLab is a quick easy way to build a vSphere environment for testing and learning using a single desktop or laptop PC and VMware Workstation, Fusion or ESXi. The whole lab runs in VMs on that one PC, even ESXi runs in a VM and can then run it’s own VMs.

What’s in the AutoLab?

The Autolab download contains a set of shell VMs and a lot of automation.  Once built the lab contains two ESXi servers, a Windows Domain controller, a Windows Virtual Centre, a FreeNAS storage appliance and a FreeSCO Router to link it to the outside world.

The download has been kept very small for easy download and distribution, it contains only free, open source, software. You will also need the installers for vSphere and Windows, you should use evaluation licenses for both vSphere (built in) and Windows.

What can I do with the AutoLab?

• Run VMs on the lab ESXi servers, using iSCSI shared storage
• Build an HA and DRS cluster
• Work with vSphere Networking
• Practice the upgrade from vSphere 4.1 to vSphere 5.0
• Use PowerShell and the VCLI to manage the lab
• Rebuild the whole lab quickly and with minimal effort
• Choose how much automation you want in the lab build
• Take the lab with you on your laptop

Will my laptop/PC be able to run the AutoLab?

If your laptop has 8GB of RAM and a recent CPU you should be able to run the lab. Here is my three year old laptop that is upgraded to 8GB of RAM running the whole lab including VMs running on the ESXi servers inside the lab.

Where can I get the AutoLab?

http://www.labguides.com/autolab/

The AutoLab lives on LabGuides.com since it is an offshoot from the effort that Nick Marshall and I working on. Can you guess what that project is?

The Installation Instructions are in a pdf and you should take a look at those to get a better idea of what is involved.  Then there are two different downloads, both contain the same VMs but with slightly different configuration and different packaging. The download for VMware Workstation should also work with Player and Fusion.  The other contains a vApp for deployment onto ESXi 5.0. Download one  and get started by following the guide.

I hope that the AutoLab will save you a lot of time and frustration in building vSphere labs.  I will be posting on ProfessionalVMware the details of the automation that is in the AutoLab so you can reuse or modify the work.

You can contact me through my other blog http://www.demitasse.co.nz/wordpress2/about/

This came up whilst doing preparation and writing for a forthcoming exam prep book. There was an objective that required changing the location of a VM Swap file. There are two PowerCLI one-liners that can help you here. One for the cluster level, then one for the hosts.

PowerCLI – Change the VM Swapfile location at the Cluster level

Get-Cluster -name “Dragons Nest” | Set-Cluster -VMSwapfilePolicy InHostDatastore

PowerCLI – Change the VM Swapfile location at the host level

Get-Cluster -name “Dragons Nest” | Get-VMHost | Set-VMHost -VMSwapfileDatastore “*local*”

Keep in mind, these are both one-liners, so you may need to do some copy/pasta-fu on them (along with changing cluster names, etc).

Video

Slides

In looking around vCO, at least in the default plug-in, there was not a good variety of workflows for configuring hosts. This workflow, will set the NTP server on a host.

Schema

Not a very creative schema, and for good reason. Also note, it is designed to work on a single host at a time. If you want to do all hosts, you can include this workflow inside a larger one to process a number of hosts:

This workflow has only a single input of type Vc:HostSystem and a single attribute, a string, for the NTP server.

Code

This is where things get a bit interesting. Using Onyx I was able to capture the basics of the JavaScript. I then beat my head against the wall getting it translated. Thanks to Joerg Lew of vcoportal.de I got the last bits I needed to make it successful:

// ——- UpdateDateTimeConfig ——-
var config = new VcHostDateTimeConfig();
config.timeZone = “UTC”;
config.ntpConfig = new VcHostNtpConfig();
var ntpServerArray = new Array()
ntpServerArray.push(ntpServer);
config.ntpConfig.server = ntpServerArray;
config.ntpConfig.server[0] = ntpServer;

// ——- Update Config ——-
var dts = VMHost.configManager.dateTimeSystem;
dts.updateDateTimeConfig(config);

// ——- EnableRuleset ——-
var ruleset = VMHost.configManager.firewallSystem;
ruleset.enableRuleset(“ntpClient”);

// ——- UpdateServicePolicy ——-
var serviceSystem = VMHost.configManager.serviceSystem;
serviceSystem.updateServicePolicy(“ntpd”, “automatic”);  // HostServiceSystem

// ——- StartService ——-
serviceSystem.startService(“ntpd”);  // HostServiceSystem

The first block builds the configuration that gets sent along to the host. The second block actually sends said configuration (also, it’s where I threw some derp on using nested managed objects… suffice it to say, it works now and JavaScript is not PowerCLI). The third set enables the NTP Client in the ESXi firewall. The fourth and fifth blocks handle setting NTP to start with the host and turning it on now.

In Action

There aren’t many exciting ways to show a workflow in action and using screenshots always feels like those cooking shows “baked at 450 for 3 hours” or so. But, here it goes:

Running:

Host Before:

Host After:

Download

This workflow can be pulled down from here. If you have any questions, comments, enhancements, etc. Drop me a line.

While I’ve been head down in the final edits for the vCO book (Pre-Order here), a few things happened in the vCO community.

vCO Happenings

• vCO Training! – vcoteam.info
• Unattended vCO vApp deployment – vcoteam.info (manual deployment here)
• Getting started with vCO – PhilipSellers.com, a good getting started piece.
• vCO Training Videos – vmware.com

More vCO Resources

As always, check out my vCO Resources page for all manner of resources from deploying the vCO vApp to plug-in info and helpful workflows.

In case you missed the announcement, the barrier to entry for vCenter Orchestrator was just lowered significantly with VMware’s release of the vCO 4.2 vApp. Here, we’ll talk about installing it.

Installing the vCO vApp

Assumptions

Basically, I’m assuming that you have an edition of vSphere that is licensed for vCenter and have downloaded both the OVF and VMDK files from the VMware download page:

Installation

Once you have the bits, do the following:

1. Fire up the vSphere client, login.
2. File > Deploy OVF Template…
3. Aim the wizard where you put the files:
   
4. Accept the EULA
5. Give it a Name & Location
6. Pick your host/cluster
7. Storage
8. Disk (it’s all greyed out)
9. Properties (This is where you set your static IPs):
   
10. Done!

Configuring

Even though most of the vApp comes configured out of the box, there are still some additional steps you need to do once the VM has been deployed:

1. Select the VM in the client, locate the IP:
   
2. Point your web browser at that IP:
   
3. Now, pick “Appliance Configuration”. You will be prompted to change the default password:
   
4. On the next page, log in as root, and you’ll be presented with the following:
   
5. You will need to do the same password change for the vCO configuration page. This time log in with the default of vmware / vmware

Logging in

1. Start on the default page for the vCO Appliance:
   
2. Start Orchestrator Client (The client is in Java, and will launch the Java Web Start bits):
   
3. Log in with vcoadmin/vcoadmin
4. Accept the SSL cert.
5. Done!

Summary

Long blog post is long. To put it in perspective however, it took me 8 minutes from start to operations not including the download. For more info on Orchestrator, check out my past posts here. You should also pre-order the vCO Book here. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop a line.

Yes! You can! I’m not talking about using vCO to call PowerCLI scripts. As well, that’s been covered before. What I’m talking about is using PowerCLI against VMware Onyx to get vCO JavaScript (Jeorg Lew’s post on it here).

First, get Onyx. I’ll wait… Have it? Excellent. Now fire it up & change the output mode to vCO JavaScript:

Next, open a new connection and select PowerCLI as the client:

Once connected, run some of your PowerCLI commands. The example below is from running “Set-KeyDelay.ps1” script from a while ago. Output from Onyx below:

// ——- ReconfigVM_Task ——-

var spec = new VcVirtualMachineConfigSpec();
spec.extraConfig = System.getModule(“com.vmware.onyx”).array(VcOptionValue, 1);
spec.extraConfig[0] = new VcOptionValue();
spec.extraConfig[0].key = “keyboard.typematicMinDelay”;
spec.extraConfig[0].value = 2000000;

managedObject.reconfigVM_Task(spec);  // VirtualMachine

It’s that Cody guy again, and well he’s late to the announcement party again… Busy is as busy does, but that said, in cleaning out my feed reader I found the following Gem:

Check it out here. Note the little bit at the bottom:

That’s right… vCO Plug-In docs on your e-reader of choice.

There has been a lot going on in the vCO space while I’ve been head down in the book. No excuse to not post about it however. This post is all about the plug-ins:

VMware posted here about the vCenter 5.x plug-in:

As promised in a previous post, the vCenter Server 5.0 plug-in adds over 50 out-of-the-box workflows to extend capabilities around networking and storage operations, and to incorporate new features like Storage DRS into fully-automated, end-to-end cloud provisioning scenarios.  As previous versions, the plug-in provides 100% coverage of the 5.0 vSphere API.  With this new plug-in, organizations can now automate a broader number of use cases, such as dynamic scaling-up and scaling-down of vSphere resources, while taking full advantage of the new vCenter Server 5.0 capabilities.

More info & release notes here.

They’ve also released the SNMP plug-in:

With the SNMP plug-in, you’ll be able to define policies that automatically trigger specific workflows when SNMP traps are received by vCO. For instance, an administrator could configure a workflow that, upon detecting that a vCenter datacenter is nearing full capacity, would reclaim unused resources or provision additional compute and storage resources.  Of course, the SNMP plug-in is able to process events beyond vCenter Server, so the triggers for workflows can come from virtually any device or system that supports SNMP.

More into & release notes here.

Also, don’t forget that there is a plug-in site on vmware.com that can be found here.