Aug 1

ESXi doesn’t include a lot of the management functions that the licensed product carries (see my previous post on doing backups in ESXi) but most of those functions are already installed, just disabled.   Here is how to enable SNMP queries and traps on an ESXi server.

  1. Enable ssh on your server
  2. I’m assuming you have already licensed your server, we’re going to need to back that out so ssh to the server as root
  3. run the following commands

    4. mv /etc/vmware/vmware.lic /etc/vmware/vmware.lic.orig
    mv /etc/vmware/license.cfg /etc/vmware/license.cfg.orig
    services.sh restart

  4. That will temporarily put you back into an eval license, you will be disconnected from your vsphere client while the services restart
  5. Now you need access to the ESX remote command line. You can do that by either downloading and installing the appliance or you can install it locally on your machine.
  6. Configure SNMP for your environment. -c is the snmp community you want to set for queries and -t is the trap destination

    7. vicfg-snmp.pl –server 192.168.1.1 -c public -t 192.168.1.2@162/public

  7. enable snmp

    8. vicfg-snmp.pl –server 192.168.1.1 -E

  8. Test your new snmp config

    9. vicfg-snmp –server 192.168.1.1 -T

  9. and lastly, download the snmp MIBs for your management platform
  10. Now move your license keys back

    11. mv /etc/vmware/vmware.lic.orig /etc/vmware/vmware.lic
    mv /etc/vmware/license.cfg.orig /etc/vmware/license.cfg
    services.sh restart

And that's it, you have snmp queries and traps on your ESXi server now.

Posted in VMWare | No Comments »
Jul 31

ESXi is one of my favorite products on the market and is really excellent for home use. It’s missing out on a few enterprise features like SNMP (I’ll show you how to get around that in a later post) but is otherwise very complete. I had previously been using a separate storage server using iscsi for my vmfs, but the dependency of the two boxes kept me from shutting down either server as needed. So, I converted everything back to local SATA storage (another post) and went on a hunt for how to backup my VMDKs. My iSCSI SAN had dual power supplies, 2 hot standby drives and I could do snapshot based backups whenever I wanted. My ESXi server has two SATA drives, one power supply and no easy way to backup. Enter GhettoVCB. GhettoVCB is a brilliant little shell script that runs on the ESXi server and performs backups of your vms using snapshots that can be stored on local, attached or network storage.  Getting GhettoVCB up and running isn’t difficult at all, you just need to make sure you have a few things in place first.

  • A place to store the backups (NFS, iSCSI, Local storage and potentially DAS)
  • Decide how many backups you want to have available
  • Decide How you want to store the files (thin, thick, etc) This consideration will impact how many backups you have available because of the different space requirements.
  • And lastly when you want your backups to run.

I’ve decided to take thin copies of my vmdks at midnight every night and store them on an NFS share with 5 backups available before the older ones get replaced.  I’m not going to try to replicate the excellent instructions that already exist for GhettoVCB,  but here is how I did it.

  1. Create an NFS mount on my NFS server with the following options

    2. /mnt/raid5/VMWare       10.0.0.0/24(rw,async,all_squash,anonuid=99,anongid=99)

  2. Mount the NFS share in vSphere and call it Backups
  3. enable ssh on your ESXi server
  4. scp ghettovcb.tar.gz to your ESXi server
  5. untar ghettovcb.tar.gz to /usr/ghettovcb
  6. edit ghettoVCB.sh and change VM_BACKUP_VOLUME to be VM_BACKUP_VOLUME=/vmfs/volumes/Backups
  7. edit DISK_BACKUP_FORMAT to be DISK_BACKUP_FORMAT=thin
  8. edit VM_BACKUP_ROTATION_COUNT to VM_BACKUP_ROTATION_COUNT=5
  9. edit EMAIL_LOG to EMAIL_LOG=0  unless you want to setup logs to be emailed to you.
  10. edit cron by running this command

    11. echo "0 6 * * * /usr/ghettoVCB/ghettoVCB.sh -a > /var/log/ghettoVCB-backup-$(date +\%s).log" >> /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root
    kill $(cat /var/run/crond.pid)
    busybox crond

  11. My cron is set for 6am because my clock is set to UTC, to 6am is midnight for me
  12. Wait until midnight for the cron to run or run it by hand yourself.

Logs will be stored in /var/log/  .  I’m backing up 8 VMs in roughly an hour using about 60GB of space (thin provisioned) and have tested restores successfully. Good luck and let me know if you have any issues!

Posted in Code, VMWare | No Comments »
Oct 9

Updated for ESXi 4
If you have a linux box and a 1 gig thumb drive, here is how to install VMWare ESXi onto that drive in 2 commands.    Download the ESXi ISO and then mount it in linux like so

mount -t iso9660 -o loop VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.0.0-171294.x86_64.iso /mnt/esx

Now we’re going to write the installer file to the thumbdrive. I’m assuming the thumbdrive is /dev/sdb

tar xvzf /mnt/esx/image.tgz usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-171294-x86_64.dd.bz2 -O | bzip2 -d -c | dd of=/dev/sdb

This will take a little bit, but once it’s done you’re good to go. pop that drive into a USB boot capable board, configure your storage and away you go!

Posted in Best Tools, VMWare | No Comments »
Jul 27

Sometimes VMs in ESX get into a bad way and just won’t shut down. When you absolutely, positively have to kill every reference to a VM, nothing does the job quiet like your Fathers light sabre the vmsupport command.

vm-support -x

Will give you a list of all of the running VMs and their VMIDs.

vm-support -X VMID

Will kill that VM like Qui-Gon Jinn.

Posted in VMWare | 1 Comment »
Jul 7

nabbed from command line fu with a clarification from blalor. appears that this is only for Fusion,
You can start a virtual machine in vmware without using the gui by using the vmrun command line.

vmrun start /PathTo/virtual_machine.vmx nogui

Posted in VMWare | 2 Comments »

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