We’ll skip the reason you need tools installed. We’ll also skip a bit on the other ways to do this in PowerCLI. Rather, we’ll bring you a way to do this in Orchestrator.

Note:

If you’re not using vCO, you should be. Why? I covered that here. Additionally, there are some excellent vCO resources here.

VMware Tools Workflows

vCO ships with four workflows for managing VMware tools:

• Mount tools installer
• Unmount tools installer
• Upgrade VMware tools
• Upgrade VMware tools at next reboot

All of these are found in the vCenter library of workflows that rolls with the vCenter plug-in. Specifically they’re found under “Library > vCenter > Virtual machine management > VMware Tools”

Mount/Unmount tools installer

These two workflows take a single VM as input and can be used when provisioning a new VM. In the case of Unmount, they are also useful in ensuring a VM does not have the tools installer mounted before a VMotion. The real power with these two comes in your ability to use them as a part of a larger workflow however.

The mount and unmount workflows both have identical schema and an identical amount of code in their scripting blocks. Let’s take a look at each:

Schema

Code

vm.mountToolsInstaller();

vm.unmountToolsInstaller();

A bigger workflow

Well, I said the power in this was when you wanted to do more than a handful of VMs right, so here’s the bigger workflow promised:

Lots of little cross-wise lines, etc. Working around the workflow:

• Get a list of everything
• Make sure we have VMs left to parse
• Set the active VM
• Is it powered on?
  • If not, increase the count, start from step 2
  • If yes, should we mount or unmount the tools?
    • If yes, mount em, continue
    • If no, unmount the tools and continue

Confused? Well, I’ll spare the additional code as you can likely figure it out, and have uploaded the completed workflow here.

Upgrade Tools (on next reboot)

The next two in our list are the upgrade tools workflows which more or less function like their PowerCLI counterparts mentioned above. The first has a really really simple schema, so we’ll skip it. The more interesting one is “on next reboot”:

Of this, the more curious part is what’s going on behind the “Upgrade Tools” bit:

if (vm.summary.guest.toolsVersionStatus != “guestToolsNeedUpgrade”) {
    System.log(“Tools do not require upgrade for vm: ” + vm.name);
}
else {
    System.log(“Upgrading tools for vm: ” + vm.name);
    task = System.getModule(“com.vmware.library.vc.vm.tools”).upgradeToolsAtNextReboot(vm);
}

Do I need an upgrade? OMG Yes I do, send a call to the vCenter API to upgrade the tools at next reboot. Or so. This too could be worked into a larger workflow like we did before. That said I’ll leave it as an exercise for the end user this time.

Summary

Is vCO awesome? You bet! This time around we mounted and unmounted your VMware tools, and set the tools to upgrade at the next VM reboot, you know, in case you don’t have a maintenance window.

As always, if you have any questions drop a line in the comments or hit me up on twitter here.

The RPM version of the VMware tools installer for Linux guests seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur. In addition, the tools ISO for Linux has been provided as it’s own download, that is hidden away on the ESX or ESXi download pages, rather than the “Tools and Drivers” page.

Not sure why, but “Tools and Drivers” seems like an obvious choice to me.

When was the last time you found yourself configuring VMware tools on Linux? Did having to incessantly press enter accepting the defaults drive you nuts too? I think I might be the last one to the game on this, but today I was stumbling through configuring VMware tools on a few Linux VMs. Stumbling, over a terminal services session, over VPN, over some rural interwebs carrier.

A less than ideal sort of situation. The solution… other than get better internets, was to execute both “~/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl” and “/usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl” with the “–default” (two dashes, then default) option. Like this:

What this does, is instead of making you hit enter for each of the options (because, ya know… you change them all that often), and accepts the defaults, making the entire install that much easier.

While going over TA1541 – Cool Little Things Marketing Did Not Tell You About vSphere 4.0 from this years VMworld, and came across this gem, a service console tool, that’s been there since ESX 3.5, and will report on all sorts of SCSI statistics.

[root@esxServerOfDoom root]# /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats -?
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats: invalid option — ?
  VscsiStats — This tool controls vscsi data collection for virtual machine disk
                disk I/O workload characterization. Users can start and stop online data
                data collection for particular VMs as well as print out online histogram data.
                Command traces can also be collected and printed.

Awesome, no? It gets better. This doc: “Using vscsiStats for Storage Performance Analysis” is a must read, as are the docs it links to:

• Storage Workload Characterization and Consolidation in Virtualized Enviornments. This paper serves as an excellent example of vscsiStats in action.
• vscsiStats: Fast and Easy Disk Workload Characterization on VMware ESX Server) and playing with the tool. Check out his presentation if you’d like more detail.

Go GO GO!

Saving one of the best for last. This tool is every bit as awesome as any of the other tools listed this week, and then some. Why? What other tool can you point at your vCenter and with a few clicks, generate a Visio. Yeah, that’s right, virtual infrastructure documentation in a few clicks. It can be pulled down from here.

Check it out:

Managing VMware vSphere 4 with The Virtualization EcoShell from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo

Have another tool you find useful? Let us know in the comments!

I’ve covered this one before, but it is so awesome it needs to be mentioned twice. It really is that good. What does it do? It latches your vCenter, and will check your clusters for HA/vMotion compatibility, and will let you know what is broken if there is something ‘off’. They have several videos and downloads available from their site here.

Have another tool you’ve found useful? One that you wish someone let you know about before you started virtualizing? Let us know in the comments.

This one goes without saying. Veeam’s Fast SCP is another file copy tool, but designed specifically to SCP or securely copy files, and do it very fast.

Consider pulling this down and giving it a shot the next time you are going to spend most of an evening or two copying a few TB of VM files about. You will love every second it saves you. Veeam’s Fast SCP can be downloaded from here.

Have another tool that you’ve found essential? One that makes your life easier? One you wish you had known about when you started virtualizing? Let us know in the comments.

The next up in the list of tools I’ve found essential to managing a virtual environment is TeraCopy. TeraCopy is not actually strictly a virtualization tool, but it will make your life as an administrator much easier. So what does TeraCopy do? It copies files from one location in windows to another… really REALLY fast. Afterall, who wants to wait for a few hundred gig of ISO or VM files to copy about?

TeraCopy looks like this:

Basically, drag the files you want to copy into the interface, then select copy, and go. It’s that easy. Teracopy can be downloaded from here.

Have any other tools you consider essential to managing your virtual environment? Let us know in the comments.

This begins a few posts on the topic of “Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed”. What qualifies as one of these tools? Well… anything that you’ve found really useful for managing VMs or your virtual infrastructure, and is something every administrator should have in their tool box.

Starting things off, is Gparted. Gparted is an open source partition resizing tool. Remember the time when Partition Magic was the only game in town for resizing partitions? Being the only tool, it had the price tag to go along with it. Now there is Gparted, which is free open source to do this. Where Gparted comes in wicked handy, is for resizing those partitions that are not otherwise easy to do. Like the OS drive of a Windows 2003 VM, or most Linux partitions that are not LVM.

The interface is fairly straight forward:

Gparted can be downloaded from here.

What tools have you found essential, that are not otherwise provided with vSphere/ESX? Let me know in the comments.

Photo by michelphoto53 

I Calm across the “Must-have VMware infrastructure plug-ins” post earlier today and got to thinking what plug-ins I’d recommend.

Turns out, that my recommendations would not differ too much, I consider these Must Haves:

– Update Manager (included)
– Storage VMotion. From Andrew at H9Labs
– PowerGUI. This may not be for everyone, but I do script quite a bit.
– Console. – Also quite useful for troubleshooting a pesky problem from the cli that is otherwise difficult to do from the VI client itself.

There are quite a few others out there, most of them listed on the H9Labs.com plug-in page. If you’re into writing your own, that can also be done using the VMware guide.