Enterprise Admins.org

As many of you know, I have created a vCheck feature request list (http://bit.ly/dGrNjh) using comments from the Virtu-Al.net site. I’ve been working through them as time permits.

In a post earlier in the week, I provided a solution to make ‘vCheck as a vSphere Client “Solutions and Application”‘. This post attempted to resolve feature request items #16 and #17. If you are interested, that post is available here: http://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/?p=258. It is not really a change to vCheck, but some steps that need to happen to make vCheck appear in vCenter.

Today, I’m am posting more updates to vCheck. This updated version includes feature requests #2, #11 and #51.

# Version 5.31- bwuch: Bug fix for LockdownMode
# Version 5.30- bwuch: Add check for VMtools installer connected
# Version 5.29- bwuch: Add check for VM capacity forecasting
# Version 5.28- bwuch: Change to Get-HTMLTable function for possible performance improvements

I’m sure update 5.28 was suggested in the Virtu-Al.net comments, but for some reason I couldn’t find it on the feature request list.

Update 5.29 isn’t perfect and I wanted to let everyone know. There are comments in the code, but I wanted to add them to this post for reference. Instead of looping through all of the virtual machines and adding up the amount of space used, I simply subtract the data store free space from the capacity and assume that is how much is being used. We also make the assumption that no more than 85% of a datastores capacity will be used (to reserve room for thin-provisioned growth, snapshots, changed block tracking and log files). These assumptions make the code run pretty fast, but I’ve seen some oddities in my test environment. (Like -41 virtual machines remaining in a data center I’m sure has enough free space for 1 or 2 more VMs 🙂 ) Here is what I’ve added to the comments of the script for reference:

# The disk forecast will be per datacenter instead of per cluster since
# Get-Datastore -Entity only supports VirtualMachine, VMHost, and Datacenter objects.
# To improve performance in code, we are going to make the following assumptions
#   Assumption 1.) Disk capacity - Free Space = space used by VMs
#   Assumption 2.) used space / count of VMs = Avg Space used per VM
#   Assumption 3.) we will reserve 15% of capacity for overhead

If anyone else has a better solution (fast and accurate) please let me know.

Here is version 5.31 for those interested: Download vCheck5.31.ps1.txt

I’ve always stored my vCheck report output file in “C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\docRoot\vCheck”. I use the file name “index.html” for the output file name, which makes it the default document name for that folder. I’ve always thought this was a really cool place to put the report, because I can simply type my vCenter server name with a “/vCheck” and see the latest report [for example, http://vcenter.domain.local/vCheck]. It automatically rewrites the URL to https just like when you go to the normal vcenter.domain.local URL.

The problem is, what I really wanted all along was for it to open up in vCenter. (It is also feature request #16 and #17 on the vCheck feature request list) I looked over the instructions at http://read.virtualizeplanet.com/?p=352 and made a sample plugin. I told it to open https://vcenter.domain.local/vCheck and then placed the XML file into my local “C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Plugins” just for testing. Re-launching my vCenter client gave me the new tab as expected. So far, so good. When clicking my new tab it gave me an error.

Web Browser Unable to download vCheck from vcenter.domain.local.  Unable to open this Internet site.  The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.

I double checked my plugin XML file and everything was in order. A little more digging showed that the current ‘moref’, ‘serverGuid’, ‘sessionId’ and other query strings were being passed to my document. It appears that Apache couldn’t process those query strings, so I decided to look somewhere else. A little bit of Googling found a nice write up by EMC vSpecialist @clintonskitson. The write up is avaialble here: https://community.emc.com/message/522461 I created a copy of the index.jsp from “C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\ROOT” and named it “vCheckRedirect.jsp”. I removed nearly all of the code and made the page do a very basic META REFRESH redirect to my existing report.

I then updated my Plugin XML to use https://vcenter.domain.local:8443/vCheckRedirect.jsp. The tab now opens a Java page, which does a simple redirect, which opens my vCheck in a tab.

Thats pretty cool, but still not what I really wanted. I now have to be in the data center inventory view to see my tab. I wanted it on the home page under ‘Solutions and Applications.’ You know, where things like Capicity IQ and vCenter Update Manager appear.

The plugin XML file had an extension parent of “InventoryView.Datacenter”. A little more digging and I found the solution. The extension parent I really wanted was “HomeView.Applications”. If you want to find more really cool places you could put this, check out the VMware document showing all of your options. It can be found here: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/vcplugin/vSphere_Plugin_40_Technote.pdf

The following articles and dcouments really helped along the way:

http://read.virtualizeplanet.com/?p=352
https://community.emc.com/message/522461
http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/vcplugin/vSphere_Plugin_40_Technote.pdf

In case anyone wants to try these steps out, I’ve created a zip file that contains some Instructions and the two files needed — the plugin XML and the JSP redirect page. You can get the zip file here: vCheckPlugin.

If you test it out, please post a comment below and let me know if it worked. Thanks!

Ever wonder which virtual machine consoles were open? I was working on an unrelated script the other day and stumbled on the ‘NumMksConnections’ property. It is a simple integer that appears to contain the number of open Mouse-Keyboard-Screen connections to a virtual machine. A simple PowerCLI one liner will show us all of the virtual machines with more than 0 open connections.

Get-View -viewtype virtualmachine | %{if ($_.RunTime.NumMksConnections -ne 0) {write-host $_.config.name has $_.RunTime.NumMksConnections console connection`(s`) open}}

I noticed a few other properties in RunTime that I’d like to try out. Question and ToolsInstallerMounted may be worth trying to throw in the next version of vCheck.

I took a night off yesterday from home repairs and painting and decided to knock out a little more on the vCheck script. Here are the new features:

# Version 5.27- bwuch: Added host uptime check
# Version 5.26- bwuch: Added host OS pivot table
# Version 5.25- bwuch: Added SSL host and vCenter checks
# Version 5.24- bwuch: Change to output file name format
# Version 5.23- bwuch: Performance fix for mis-named VM check
# Version 5.22- bwuch: More changes to prevent 4.1.1 warnings

Here is the latest version for review & comments: vCheck5.27.ps1. Also, if you want to check the feature request list it is available here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgJcHGY0M6CTdHR3RjZMZm45SkUybS1yZFV2bXVXYWc&hl=en&authkey=CJT_mdML

One of the best scripts I have ever used is the Virtu-Al.net vCheck daily report (http://www.virtu-al.net/featured-scripts/vcheck/). Not only does it show problems in your virtual infrastructure, it also shows the power of PowerCLI and PowerShell. A little over a month ago I decided I would attempt to learn more PowerCLI — but I needed a project to get me started. After a few days I decided to go through all of the comments on the vCheck daily report looking for feature requests. Right now my list has 54 items on it — with 21 marked as completed. Some of the feature requests are things I have added after looking at the script for a few hours and learning a bit more about PowerCLI.

If I had some more time I would keep working on these features. However, as luck would have it, I just bought my first home. Its about twenty years old or so and needs some minor work that I’m going to try and tackle myself. For the next month or two I’ll be working on a different list of feature requests — using tools other than PowerCLI.

I wanted to share the new features and the checklist I’ve been using as a baseline. Here is a listing of the new features:

# Version 5.21- bwuch: Change code to prevent warnings when running with PowerCLI 4.1.1
# Version 5.20- bwuch: Add PowerCLI Version check and vCenter Update Manager host baseline compliance
# Version 5.19- bwuch: QA/QC bug check fix data issues
# Version 5.18- bwuch: Added Guest OS pivot table
# Version 5.16- bwuch: Added host hardware check
# Version 5.15- bwuch: changed variable name on cluster cpu allocation ratio check
# Version 5.14- bwuch: fixed quotes on VM limit check
# Version 5.13- bwuch: added sort to old VM hardware check
# Version 5.12- bwuch: QA/QC bug check; minor cosmetic fixes
# Version 5.11- bwuch: Added check for cluster CPU allocation ratio (ie vCPU to pCore)
# Version 5.10- bwuch: Added option to include all headers -- even on tests that return no results
# Version 5.09- bwuch: Added several additional checks listed on my blog http://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/?p=196
# Version 5.08- bwuch: Added fix from Leo to check for Free Space instead of capacity
# Version 5.07- bwuch: Added check for VMTools that need updated; provided by kevin, slight update by Traveller
# Version 5.06- bwuch: Added comment on how to specify multiple NTP servers as suggested by Mark
# Version 5.05- bwuch: Added check for unwanted hardware as suggested by Jon
# Version 5.04- bwuch: Added fix for select-object statement provided by Ccalvin
# Version 5.03- bwuch: Add VM resource limit check using code provided by Ed.
# Version 5.02- bwuch: Show VCB garbage bug fix from rvdnieuwendijk
# Version 5.01- bwuch: Show overallocation bug fix from James Davis

Here are the files — version 5.21 of the script and the latest comments:
vCheck5.21.ps1

Edit: 2011/01/16 – Moved vCheck Comments/feature requests to Google Documents for easier maintenance. http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgJcHGY0M6CTdHR3RjZMZm45SkUybS1yZFV2bXVXYWc&hl=en&authkey=CJT_mdML