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.

Still cleaning out my feed reader after having slacked for a few days, and came across this gem on Yellow-Bricks:

I’ll have to give this a test shortly to see how well it performs. Woot!

This last weekend, the Wordpress install on the site wasn’t the only thing that got an upgrade. The Professional VMware ‘offices’ got an upgrade as well. I’ve upgraded from a monolithic old wooden eyesore of a desk to a larger, aluminum & glass setup, that I think is just stylin. Take a look:

Enough of that however, lets talk about VMware tools, upgrading them, why should you, and some methods how.

VMware Tools!

The VMware tools provide any number of little tweaks to the guest OS they’re installed on. First they provide some degree of “Paravirtualization” This helps with timekeeping, startup, shutdown, and overall performance.

VMware has used certain aspects of paravirtualization techniques across the VMware product line for years in the form of VMware tools and optimized virtual device drivers. The VMware tools service provides a backdoor to the VMM Hypervisor used for services such as time synchronization, logging and guest shutdown. Vmxnet is a paravirtualized I/O device driver that shares data structures with the hypervisor. It can take advantage of host device capabilities to offer improved throughput and reduced CPU utilization. It is important to note for clarity that the VMware tools service and the vmxnet device driver are not CPU paravirtualization solutions. They are minimal, non-intrusive changes installed into the guest OS that do not require OS kernel modification.

Why Upgrade the tools?

There are any number of reasons for keeping the tools updated then. Lets take a look at a few:

• Bugs! It’s software, there will be bugs.
• Security! With bugs, there can be security flaws. With something that lets the guest have limited backdoor access, it’s important to pay attention here.
• Performance! With each new release, tweaks are made that can help your virtualized workloads perform better.
• There are more, and I’m sure you can come up with plenty, if not, check out this doc from the Fusion team, a tools 101!

So now we have an idea as to what the tools are, and why updating them is good. So how do we do it?

Upgrading the tools

There are quite a few ways to do this, as such, we’ll cover some, but not all of them.

The first way to upgrade the tools and likely simplest is with the VI client, select your VM or list of VMs > right click > “Install/Upgrade tools”

Next we’ll hit it with the PowerShell Bat:

From Hal R’s post.

This will parse through all your VM’s and upgrade the VMware tools without reboot.

Any questions? Comments? Hit me up on Twitter or in the comments. Thanks to Hal for the sexy PowerShell.