Linux Kernel 3.7 and VMware Tools issue

I got aware of this issue last week after installing a Fedora 18 virtual machine on Fusion 5. The installation of the Tools went as expected but when the install process launched the vmware-tools-config,pl script I got the typical error of not being able to find the Linux Kernel headers.

Searching for a valid kernel header path...
The path "" is not a valid path to the 3.7.2-204.fc18.x86_64 kernel headers.
Would you like to change it? [yes]

I installed the kernel headers and devel packages with yum.

[root@fed18 ~]# yum install kernel-headers kernel-devel

Fired up again the configuration script and got the same error. The problem is that snce kernel 3.7 all the kernel header files have been relocated to a new path and because of that the script is not able to find them. To solve it just create a symlink of the version.h file from the new location to the old one.

[root@fed18 src]# ln -s /usr/src/kernels/3.7.2-204.fc18.x86_64/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /lib/modules/3.7.2-204.fc18.x86_64/build/include/linux/

With the problem fixed I launched the config script again and the tools finally got configured without problems.

[root@fed18 ~]# vmware-config-tools.pl 
Initializing...

Making sure services for VMware Tools are stopped.
Stopping Thinprint services in the virtual machine:
 Stopping Virtual Printing daemon: done
Stopping vmware-tools (via systemctl): [ OK ]

The VMware FileSystem Sync Driver (vmsync) allows external third-party backup 
software that is integrated with vSphere to create backups of the virtual 
machine. Do you wish to enable this feature? [no]

Before you can compile modules, you need to have the following installed...
make
gcc
kernel headers of the running kernel

Searching for GCC...
Detected GCC binary at "/bin/gcc".
The path "/bin/gcc" appears to be a valid path to the gcc binary.
Would you like to change it? [no]

Searching for a valid kernel header path...
Detected the kernel headers at 
"/lib/modules/3.7.2-204.fc18.x86_64/build/include".
The path "/lib/modules/3.7.2-204.fc18.x86_64/build/include" appears to be a 
valid path to the 3.7.2-204.fc18.x86_64 kernel headers.
Would you like to change it? [no]

Juanma.

How to install the vCloud Adapter in vC Ops 5.6

Installing the vCloud adapter, or any vC Ops adapter, is a relatively easy task as we will explain in this post.

Firstly you need to download the adapter from ftp.integrien.com. Choose the .PAK file.

Once it is downloaded log into vC Ops Admin UI (/admin”>https://<vcops-ui-vm>/admin). From the Update tab browse for the downloaded file and click Update.

It will ask for confirmation and the will present you the EULA. Accept it and click OK.

Will ask for confirmation again.  During the updating process you will be automatically logged out from the Administration Portal, will be unable to log back in until the update is done.

The update process can take a few minutes so grab a coffee and wait until it’s done.

Once the vCloud Adapter installation is done proceed to vC Ops Custom UI (/custom”>https://<vcops-ui-vm>/custom). From the Admin menu go to Support.

In the support screen open the Info tab, look for the Adapters Info pane and click the Describe gear button.

When the describe process is finished refresh the page to check for the adapter presence. Match the adapter version with the build number of the downloaded package.

At this point the adapter is installed, now we are going to configure it to collect from our vCloud instance.

From the Environment menu select Configuration –> Adapter Instances. Select the vC Ops Server collector and the vCloud adapter from the drop down menus. Click on Add New Adapter Instance.

Fill out he fields from the pop-up window. For the IP/Hostname field the public address of the vCloud can be used if a REST API base URL has been assigned.

Remember to set the Auto Discovery option to true unless you want to force the discovery manually.

At this point there will be no credential available from the drop down menu. Click Add to create it.

Click OK and the vCloud Adapter should be configured and collecting. To test it go to Environment –> Environment Overview. In the left pane look for vCloud related Resource Kind, select anyone and look for new resources with a vCloud Data Source in the right pane.

Following this procedure any vCenter Operations Manager relationship adapter can be installed and almost configure, have in mind that of course there will be differences in the credentials and the adapter specifics.

Juanma.

VMworld 2012 – Day -1

This year I finally manage to go to VMworld. It’s been held in the beautiful Barcelona, just a few hundred kilometers from Madrid, and now that the event is gone, the dust has settled and everybody is back at home I decided to share my experiences from the conference in a few blog posts. Also don’t expect technical posts but personal ones :-)

My personal VMworld really started on Sunday morning when after a short flight from Madrid I headed to the conference venue.

There I found three of my colleagues from VMware Spain preparing to work as Lab Staff for the next four days. I took the below picture while we were waiting out of the HOL room, from left to right Jesus Huerta, Marti Perarnau and Carlos Sen.

During the afternoon the HOL Staff and other VMware employees willing to do to labs were allowed to do so. I jumped in and choose the Application Director 5.0 lab, I’ve been trying to find some free time to taste App Director and finally I could.

I was impressed with the product. All the creation process was very straightforward and in the end I had an application with a vFabric Web Server at the frontend, vFabric tc Server as the middleware layer and vFabric vPostgres as the backend. Finally the lab allow me to scale out the app in order to attend a fictitious higher demand. Like I said very easy.

After my satisfactory lab experience I moved to the Solutions Exchange area where all the booths were being built. The transformation process is really amazing. One day there is nothing and a couple of days later… Voila!

Before continuing with the story I have to say that during all day I was tweeting like crazy trying to get in touch with Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja) and Josh Atwell (@Josh_Atwell), both from Cisco, and after a couple of funny moments with Amy showing my Twitter avatar to other VMware staff at the labs we were capable to meet and start the preparations for the evening.

Also thanks to Amy and after walking a bit through the Solutions Exchange area I was able to find my dear friend Fred Nix (@NixFred) from EMC.

We’ve been trying to meet in real life for almost two years without any luck so for me this was a very special moment. The above picture is from Tuesday when the VMworld was “on fire” but I believe it illustrates how funny and awesome is this dude :D

vRockStar Party

Amy, Josh and myself left the conference in the great company of Patrick Carmichael (@VMCarmichael), like yours truly from VMware, and headed to the vRockStar Party. This awesome party was organized by Patrick Redknap (@PatrickRedknap), Marco Broeken (@MBroeken) and sponsored by PHD Virtual, NimbleStorage, the DutchVMUG and ITQ, the company my friend Arjan Timmerman (@Arjantim) works for, and of course he was at the Hard Rock too.

We arrived at Plaza Catalunya by bus and from there we felt brave enough to walk a couple of klicks to the Barcelona Hard Rock Café, where the vRockStar Party was going to be celebrated. After a very long and funny walk with me trying to help Josh to improve his Spanish, and Josh and me complaining about Patrick navigation skills, we arrived at Hard Rock Café. We meet there the one and only J Mezt (@drjmetz) and the party begun…

Lots of beer, geek talk and great friends. You can’t ask more from a party.

Juanma.

VMworld 2012 Europe… I’ll be there

Yes, this year I manage to get myself to the European edition of VMworld. I’m really excited about it, and the best is that I’ll be lucky enough to have spare time during the event to attend some of the most interesting sessions, meet other vExperts, hang in the solutions exchange with the partners, engage with some customers and of course go to the parties during the night (see you in the Veeam one ;-)

So if you are coming to Spain for the most awesome tech event the year don’t forget to ping me by Twitter or Google Plus :-)

See you in Barcelona my dear readers and friends :D

Juanma.

Power and maintenance operations in ESXi 5.1 with esxcli

ESXi 5.1 comes with many improvements and one of them is new namespaces and commands in esxcli.

Those new commands enable a system administrator to perform a shutdown, a reboot or a maintenance operation in a host.

Under the system namespace the new commands are the equivalents of the classic vicfg/esxcfg-hostops which until now was the only way to perform such kind of operations with vCLI and are also accesible locally on ESXi Shell.

Maintenance mode operations

Getting the basic usage of the command is as simple as always. You can perform two operations.

• Get the state of the host
• Put the the host in or out of Maintenance Mode

~ # esxcli system maintenanceMode 
Usage: esxcli system maintenanceMode {cmd} [cmd options]
Available Commands: 
  get                   Get the maintenance mode state of the system. 
  set                   Enable or disable the maintenance mode of the system. 
~ #

• Get the state of the host

~ # esxcli system maintenanceMode get 
Disabled 
~ #

• Put the host in Maintenance Mode

~ # esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e true -t 0 
~ # 
~ # esxcli system maintenanceMode get 
Enabled 
~ #

Power operations

With the shutdown command the host can be either rebooted or shutdown. If the ESXi server is not in Maintenance Mode mode the operation will not be allowed.

~ # esxcli system shutdown 
Usage: esxcli system shutdown {cmd} [cmd options]
Available Commands: 
  poweroff              Power off the system. The host must be in maintenance mode. 
  reboot                Reboot the system. The host must be in maintenance mode. 
~ #

For both task the delay and reason parameter must be provided.

~ # esxcli system shutdown poweroff 
Error: Missing required parameter -r|--reason
Usage: esxcli system shutdown poweroff [cmd options]
Description: 
  poweroff              Power off the system. The host must be in maintenance mode.
Cmd options: 
  -d|--delay=<long>     Delay interval in seconds 
  -r|--reason=<str>     Reason for performing the operation (required) 
~ #

• Power off the host

~ # esxcli system shutdown poweroff --delay=10 --reason=”Hardware maintenance”

• Reboot the host

~ # esxcli system shutdown reboot -d 10 –r “Patches applied”

Juanma.

VCSA 5.1– A quick look

Yesterday was a very exciting day, VMware finally announced the new vCloud Suite 5.1. With new products and features announced, each one of them as great as ever.

But yours truly decided that instead of presenting you a generic “What’s new” post it was more interesting, at least for me and hope also to you, to focus in one of my favorite pieces of vSphere, the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance and in a couple of articles describe what new features are coming and how to perform an upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1.

What’s new in the VCSA 5.1

With this new release of the vCenter Server VA a few new features have been added, most of them related to the WebUI and to the new features and services that have been released globally for the vCenter 5.1, Windows and Linux based versions.

These new enhancements can be seen in the Summary section of the vCenter Server Tab as shown in the screenshot below.

From here all the vCenter Service can be started and stopped. The Services Tab no longer exists and it’s now a section of the vCenter Server Tab.

In the Storage Usage are you can check the disk usage of the different components of the VCSA.

There is also a Utilities are where you can:

• Generate a support bundle in case of an incidence with the vCenter Server.
• Download the configuration file of the VCSA and then open it in your favorite text editor.

• Launch again the Setup Wizard to configure the VCSA from scratch or make modifications to some of he initial settings.
• Upload the Windows Sysprep files to the vCenter VA.

For this last option the procedure is quite simple. Click the

Upload

button.

A new windows will open, select the operating system and browse for the location of the files.

The files will be uploaded to /etc/vmware-vpx/sysprep/<OS>.

Additionally in the vCenter Server Tab two new sections have been added.

The Service section where the VCSA administrator can setup:

• ESXi Dump Collector repository size
• vSphere Auto Deploy repository size
• Inventory size

The SSO section. Here you can configure all the settings related to the newly introduced Single Sign On server.

In the next post we will discuss about VCSA 5.1 initial deployment and how to upgrade from 5.0 and 5.1.

Juanma.

Change ESXi 5 iSCSI iqn with esxcli

After my previous post about getting the iqn of an ESXi using esxcli Andy Banta (@andybanta) commented on Twitter that you can also change the iqn of the host with esxcli.

As he said it would be tremendously useful if you need to physically replace the server and don’t want to modify all your storage infrastructure, it’s easier to just modify the iqn of the new server and set it to the old name.

The task is as easier as the one described in last post. Using esxcli command with the iscsi namespace you can change the name and the alias of the adapter.

As a precaution first retrieve the current iqn to check that it’s the correct server.

To change the name you have to provide the adapter and the new name.

Hope you find this useful, any comments and suggestions are welcome as always.

Juanma.

How to get iSCSI iqn using esxcli in ESXi 5

Back in 2010 I wrote a post about how to get the iSCSI iqn of an ESXi 4.x server using vSphere CLI from the vMA or any other system with the vCLI installed on it.

The method described in that article is still valid for ESXi 5.0 since the old vicfg and esxcfg commands are still available, however with 5.0 version you can get a similar result using the new esxcli namespaces, following is how to do it.

First task is to get a list of the iSCSI HBAs in order to know the name of the software iSCSI initiator.

Next we get the info of the adapter.

Look at the Name field to get the iqn and we are done.

Juanma.

A bit of troubleshooting of the vCenter Server Appliance

If your vCSA is configured to use the embedded DB2 database and if it’s not properly shutdown, next you power it on may be you should not be able to power on a VM like in the screenshot below…

…or the vSphere Client will not show some of information about the host or the VMs.

We all have seen those kind of errors in our homelabs from time to time. In the Windows-based vCenter it was relatively easy to solve, close the client, log into the vCenter, restart the vCenter Server service and in the next login into the vSphere Client everything will go as expected.

However how can we resolve this issue in the vCenter Linux appliance? Can’t be easier.

There are two ways to restart the vCenter services in the vCSA:

• From he WebUI administration interface
• From the command line

For the first method log into the WebUI of the vCSA by accessing https://<vCSA_URL>:5480 with your favorite web browser.

In the vCenter Server screen in the Status tab there stop and start the vCenter Server service from the Action buttons.

The second method is faster and easier, and to be sincere it feels more natural for me and probably for the other Unix Geek/Sysadmins out there.

The vCenter service in the Linux appliance is vmware-vpxd so with a simple service vmware-vpxd restart we’ll be on business again. Check the screenshot below.

Finally as seen in the screen capture you can check the status of the service.

More on troubleshooting the vCSA in a future post.

Juanma.

VMworld 2012, it’s time to vote

I know that I owe you an apology, it’s been more than a month since my last post but you know how is to join a new company. I had some of the more amazing weeks in my career with long sessions in front of the laptop trying to get all the VMware intranet straight into my brain ;-)

Anyway VMworld is just around the corner and I want to recommend some of the sessions I voted for.

• 1154 - vCloud Director Infrastructure Resiliency – DR of the Cloud – Chris Colotti and Duncan Epping
• 1159 - Architecting and Operating a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster – Lee Dilworth and Duncan Epping
• 1166 – Monitoring a vCloud Infrastructure – David Hill and Andy Troup
• 1168 – Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure – Chris Colotti, David Hill and Aidan Dalgleish
• 1504 – Ask the Expert vBloggers - Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Rick Scherer, Frank Denneman, Chad Sakac
• 1199 – vSphere Storage Appliance Deep Dive & New Features – Cormac Hogan
• 2427  - Storage Wars: Conquering and Optimizing the vSphere Storage Layer – Eric Siebert
• 2430 – How to Increase the Availability of Business Critical Applications Using Virtualization – Andrea Mauro
• 2431 – To Block or to File: Choosing the Right Storage Protocol for your VMware Environment – Eric Siebert
• 2442 – Designing vSphere Network using HP Virtual Connect Flex Fabric – Prasenjit Sarkar
• 2508 – Running vFabric GemFire in a Cloud – the Advantages and Challenges with Data Fabrics in VM’s - Michael Ryan and Sudhir Menon
• 2619 – Metro Storage Clusters: Two Storage Vendors Discuss Key Considerations for VMware’s Latest HCL Category – Eric Siebert and Scott Lowe
• 2857 – Building Cloud Ready Applications Using vFabric Application Director - Rajesh Khazanchi

Beside those sessions there are dozens of very interesting sessions to choose so please cast your vote at VMworld.com you have until 8th of June. This edition is going to be huge. Hope to see you there.

Juanma.