Troubleshooting vSphere Guest Operations API

What is vSphere Guest Operations

Recently I’ve been heavily utilizing vSphere Guest Operations API for automating vCenter patching. vSphere Guest Operations (GuestOps) is an API, which allows you to run commands on a virtual machine without needing to connect to it over the network. All you need is credentials to the vCenter managing the virtual machine and to the virtual machine itself.

GuestOps can be called by using an Invoke-VMScript PowerCLI cmdlet in the following format:

> Invoke-VMScript -ScriptText “uname -a” -vm vc01 -GuestUser root -GuestPassword VMware1!

Cmdlet will talk to the vCenter, vCenter will talk to ESXi host, ESXi host will talk to VMware Tools and, eventually, VMware Tools will run the command on the Guest OS.

It worked well for me when I was running commands on VCSA 6.0 VM (managed by another vCenter), but after patching and upgrading this VM to VCSA 6.7 I encountered the following error:

Error occured while executing script on guest OS in VM ‘vc01’. Could not locate “Powershell” script interpreter in any of the expected locations. Probably you do not have enough permissions to execute command within guest.

It’s obvious from the error message that cmdlet is doing something wrong, since it’s supposed to use bash in Linux, not PowerShell.

Enable Debugging in VMware Tools

To better understand what was going on, I logged in to VCSA via SSH and enabled VMware Tools debugging (see KB1007873 for instructions on how to do that) and restarted Open VM Tools:

# systemctl restart vmtoolsd.service

After running the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet again, this is what I noticed in vmsvc.log debug log:

[vix] VixTools_StartProgram: User: root args: progamPath: ‘cmd.exe’, arguments: ‘/C powershell -NonInteractive -EncodedCommand cABvAHcAZQByAHMAaABl…

So it wasn’t just a misleading PowerCLI error message, Invoke-VMScript was actually trying to call a PowerShell command using Windows command interpreter on a Linux VM.

Solution

My guess is that since VMware has changed underlying operating system on VCSA from SUSE Linux to Photon OS, Invoke-VMScript can no longer properly identify the underlying OS and defaults to Windows.

Simple solution to this problem is to give a helping hand to Invoke-VMScript cmdlet and specify interpreter using -ScriptType Bash parameter. This is what a proper resulting debug log message will look like:

[vix] VixToolsStartProgramImpl: started ‘”/bin/bash” -c “bash > /tmp/vmware-root/powerclivmware159 2>&1 -c \”uname -a\””‘, pid 7456

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Run CLI Commands on NSX Manager Using REST API

Over the last few years I’ve had a chance to work with NSX-V REST APIs in many different shapes and forms. Directly from vRealize Orchestrator and PowerShell/PowerNSX, indirectly from vRealize Automation or simply by making calls from Postman, which is sometimes required during NSX deployment and upgrades.

To date I haven’t been able to find any gaps in the API and can say only good things about it. It is very well documented. You can find detailed descriptions of all requests in NSX API Guide PDF or interactively browse it in API explorer on https://code.vmware.com.

But at the end of the day, NSX REST API is only a subset of what you can do from CLI and there are situations where it’s not sufficient. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you want to know how much storage is available on NSX Manager appliance log partition. There’s a REST API call, which will give you a response similar to this:

GET https://nsxm/api/1.0/appliance-management/system/storageinfo

<storageInfo>
  <totalStorage>86G</totalStorage>
  <usedStorage>22G</usedStorage>
  <freeStorage>64G</freeStorage>
  <usedPercentage>25</usedPercentage>
</storageInfo>

As you can see, it answers the question of how much total space is available on the appliance, but doesn’t provide a full per partition breakdown available from the CLI via “show filesystem”:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       5.6G  1.2G  4.1G  23% /
tmpfs           7.9G  232K  7.9G   1% /run
devtmpfs        7.9G     0  7.9G   0% /dev
/dev/sda6        44G   19G   24G  44% /common
/dev/loop0       16G   45M   15G   1% /common/vdisk_mnt

So what are the options here? What is not widely known is that you can use NSX central command-line interface to remotely invoke appliance CLI commands using REST API.

Invoking CLI Commands

NSX REST API has a handy POST call https://nsxm/api/1.0/nsx/cli?action=execute. All you need to provide in addition to Authorization credentials using “Basic Auth” option is the following body in XML format:

<nsxcli>
  <command>show filesystem</command>
</nsxcli>

In response you will get a body in “text/plain” format, which is the only drawback of this method. You will need to parse the response in your scripting language of choice. In PowerShell, if you made the original call using Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet and saved it into the $response variable, it can look something like this:

$responseRows = $response.Content -split "`n"
foreach($row in $responseRows) {
  if($row -Like "*/dev/sda6*") {
    $pctUsed = $row.Split(" ",[StringSplitOptions]"RemoveEmptyEntries")[4]
    $pctUsedValue = $pctUsed.Substring(0, $pctUsed.Length-1)
    Write-Host "Space utilization on the log partition is $pctUsed."
    break
  }
}

Conclusion

For most use cases NSX REST API provides all the necessary information about NSX component configuration in structured JSON or XML format. This method is more of an exception rather than a rule, but it’s a nice tool to have in your tool belt, when you run out of options.

vSphere 6.0 REST API: A History Lesson

I’m glad to see how VMware products are becoming more and more automation-focused these days. NSX has always had rich REST API capabilities, which I can’t complain about. And vSphere is now starting to catch up. vSphere 6.5 was the first release where REST API started getting much more attention. See these official blog posts for example:

• What’s New with Developer and Automation Interfaces for vSphere 6.5?
• Getting Started with the vSphere Automation SDK for REST
• Introducing Developer and Automation Interfaces for vSphere 6.7

But not many people know that vSphere 6.5 wasn’t the first release where REST API became available. Check this forum thread on VMTN “Does vCenter 6.0 support RESTFUL api?”:

I think its only supported for 6.5 as below blogs has a customer asked the same question and reply is no..

It’s not entirely true, even though I know why the OP got a “No” answer. Let me explain.

vSphere 6.0 REST API

VMware started to make first steps towards REST API starting from 6.0 release. If you have a legacy vSphere 6.0 environment you can play with, you can easily test that by opening the following URL:

https://vcenter/rest/com/vmware/vapi/metadata/cli/command

You will get a long list of commands available in 6.0 release:

It may look impressive, but if you look closely you will quickly notice that they are all Content Library or Tagging related. Quote from the referenced blog post:

VMware vCenter has received some new extensions to its REST based API. In vSphere 6.0, this API set provides the ability to manage the Content Library and Tagging but now also includes the ability to manage and configure the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) based functionality and basic VM management.

That is right, in vSphere 6.0 REST API is very limited, you won’t get inventory data, backup or update API. All you can do is manage Content Library and Tagging, which, frankly, is not very practical.

Making REST API Calls

If Content Library and Tagging use cases are applicable to you or you are just feeling adventurous this is an example of how you can make a call to vSphere 6.0 REST API via Postman.

All calls are POST-based and action (get, list, create, etc.) is specified as a parameter, so pay close attention to request format.

First you will need to generate authentication token by making a POST call to https://vcenter/rest/com/vmware/cis/session, using “Basic Auth” for Authorization and you will get a token in response:

Then change Authorization to “No auth” and specify the token in “vmware-api-session-id” header in your next call. In this example I’m getting a list of all content libraries (you will obviously get an empty response if you haven’t actually created one):

Some commands require a body, to determine the body format use the following POST call to https://vcenter/rest/com/vmware/vapi/metadata/cli/command?~action=get, with the following body in JSON format:

{
	"identity": {
        "name": "get",
        "path": "com.vmware.content.library"
	}
}

Where “path” is the operation and “name” is the action from the https://vcenter/rest/com/vmware/vapi/metadata/cli/command call above.

If you’re looking for more detailed information, I found this blog post by Mitch Tulloch very useful:

• Understanding the VMware REST API Interface

Conclusion

There you have it. vSphere 6.0 does support REST API, it’s just not very useful, that’s why no one talks about it.

This blog post won’t help you if you are stuck in a stone age and need to manage vSphere 6.0 via REST API, but it at least gives you a definitive answer of whether REST API is supported in vSphere 6.0 and what you can do with it.

If you do find yourself in such situation, I recommend to fall back on PowerCLI, if possible.

NSX Optimistic Locking and PowerNSX

Recently, when working on some NSX-V automation, I came across an interesting issue, which I want to discuss here, since there’s almost no information on the Internet (while I’m writing this), that would help to solve it or even point you in the right direction. It has to do with PowerNSX and Optimistic Locking in NSX (which technically is not even a locking mechanism), but let’s start from the beginning.

If you ever used PowerNSX module to automate NSX via PowerShell you noticed that most of the code examples use pipelines to run PowerNSX cmdlets. So instead of using variables, like so:

$Edge = Get-NsxEdge vRA7 _ edge
$LoadBalancer = Get-NsxLoadBalancer -Edge $Edge
Set-NsxLoadBalancer -LoadBalancer $LoadBalancer -enabled
New-NsxLoadBalancerApplicationProfile -LoadBalancer $LoadBalancer -Name $WebAppProfileName -Type $VipProtocol –SslPassthrough

all commands are run this way instead:

Get-NsxEdge vRA7_edge | Get-NsxLoadBalancer | Set-NsxLoadBalancer -enabled
Get-NsxEdge vRA7_dge | Get-NsxLoadBalancer | New-NsxLoadBalancerApplicationProfile -Name $WebAppProfileName -Type $VipProtocol –SslPassthrough

What’s the difference you may ask, besides the fact the the second variant is slower, because you retrieve edge and load balancer objects multiple times, instead of once, compared to the first variant? There’s actually a strong reason for it. More specifically, it is the following error that you gonna get if you don’t use pipelines:

invoke-nsxwebrequest : Invoke-NsxWebRequest : The NSX API response received indicates a failure. 409 : Conflict : Response Body: {“errorCode”:101, “details”:”Concurrent object access error. Refresh UI or fetch the latest copy of the object and retry the operation.”, “rootCauseString”:null, “moduleName”:null, “errorData”:null}

See, NSX uses Optimistic Locking (yes, there’s Pessimistic Locking as well) to handle concurrency. Its purpose is to make sure that if you’re making a change to an object in NSX you are aware of its current state. In the above example, you saved load balancer into a variable, changed the load balancer state to enabled and then tried to create an application profile, supplying load balancer saved in a variable as a parameter to the cmdlet. But the load balancer (and edge) state has changed and you’re basically using an old (stale) version of the object. You either have to retrieve the current state of the object again or avoid this issue all together by simply using pipelines and retrieve the up-to-date version of the object with every call.

Read this article if you want to know more about Optimistic Locking:

• https://enterprisecraftsmanship.com/2017/09/18/optimistic-locking-automatic-retry/

If you found this useful, please leave a comment, smash that like button and hit notification bell to not miss new blog posts ever again.

vRealize Automation Disaster Recovery

Introduction

VMware has invested a lot of time and effort in vRealize Automation high availability. For medium and large deployment scenarios VMware recommends using a load balancer (Citrix, F5, NSX) to distribute traffic between vRA appliance and infrastructure components, as well as database clustering (such as MS SQL availability groups) for database high availability. Additionally, in vRA 7.3 VMware added support for automatic failover of vRA appliance’s embedded PostgreSQL database, which was a manual process prior to that.

There is a clear distinction, however, between high availability and disaster recovery. Generally speaking, HA covers redundancy within the site and is not intended to protect from full site failure. Site Recovery Manager (or another replication product) is required to protect vRA in a DR scenario, which is described in more detail in the following document:

• vRealize Suite 7.0 Disaster Recovery by Using Site Recovery Manager 6.1

In my opinion, there are two important aspects that are missing from the aforementioned document, which I want to cover in this blog post: restoring VM UUIDs and changing vRA IP address. I will cover them in the order that these tasks would usually be performed if you were to fail over vRA to DR:

1. Exporting VM UUIDs
2. Changing IP addresses
3. Importing VM UUIDs

I will also only touch on how to change VM reservations. Which is also an important step, but very well covered in VMware documentation already.

Note: this blog post does not provide configuration guidelines for VM replication software, such as Site Recovery Manager, Zerto or RecoverPoint and is focused only on DR aspects related to vRA itself. Refer to official documentation of corresponding products to determine how to set up VM replication to your disaster recovery site.

Exporting VM UUIDs

VMware uses two UUIDs to identify a VM. BIOS UUID (uuid.bios in .vmx file) was the original VM identifier implemented to identify a VM and is derived from the hardware VM is provisioned on. But it’s not unique. If VM is cloned, the clone will have the same BIOS UUID. So the second identifier was introduced called Instance UUID (vc.uuid in .vmx file), which is generated by vCenter and is unique within a single vCenter (two VMs in different vCenters can have the same Instance UUID).

When VMs are failed over, Instance UUIDs change. Compare VirtualMachine.Admin.AgentID (Instance UUID) and VirtualMachine.Admin.UUID (BIOS UUID) on original and failed over VMs.

Why does this matter? Because vRA uses Instance UUIDs to keep track of managed VMs.  If Instance UUIDs change, vRA will show the corresponding VMs as missing under Infrastructure > Managed Machines. And you won’t be able to manage them.

So it’s important to export VM Instance UUIDs before failover, which can then be used to restore the original values. This is how you can get the Instance UUID of a given VM using PowerCLI:

> (Get-VM vm_name).extensiondata.config.InstanceUUID

Here, on my GitHub page, you can find a script that I have put together to export Instance UUIDs of all VMs in CSV format.

Changing IP addresses

Once you’ve saved the Instance UUIDs, you can move on to failover. vRA components should be started in the following order:

1. MS SQL database
2. vRA appliance
3. IaaS server

If network subnets, that all components are connected to, are stretched between two sites, when VMs are brought up at DR, there are no additional reconfiguration required. But usually it’s not the case and servers need to be re-IP’ed. IaaS server network setting are changed the same as on any other Windows server machine.

vRealize Appliance network settings are changed in vRA appliance management interface, that can be accessed at https://vra-appliance-hostname:5480, under Network > Address tab. The problem is, if IP addresses change at DR, it will be challenging to reach vRA appliance over the network. To work around that, connect to vRA VM console and run the following script from CLI to change appliance’s network settings:

# /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net

Don’t forget to update the DNS record for vRA appliance in DNS. For IaaS server it’s not needed, as long as you allow Dynamic DNS (DDNS) updates.

Importing VM UUIDs

After the failover all of your VMs will have missing status in vRA. To make vRA recognize failed over VMs you will need to revert Instance UUIDs back to the original values. In PowerCLI this can be done in the following way:

> $spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
> $spec.instanceUuid = ’52da9b14-0060-dc51-4733-3b01e912edd2′
> $vm = Get-VM -Name vm_name
> $vm.Extensiondata.ReconfigVM_Task($spec)

I’ve written another script, that will perform this task for you, which you can find on my GitHub page.

You will need two files to make the script work. The vm_vc_uuids.csv file you generated before, with the list of original VM Instance UUIDs. As well as the list of missing VMs in CSV format, that you can export from vRA after the failover on the Infrastructure > Managed Machines page:

This is an example of the script command line options and the output:

You will need to run an inventory data collection from the Infrastructure > Compute Resources > Compute Resources page. vRA will discover VMs and update their status to “On”.

Updating reservations

If you try to run any Day 2 operation on a VM with the old reservation in place, you will get an error similar to this:

Error processing [Shutdown], error details:
Error getting property ‘runtime.powerState’ from managed object (null)
Inner Exception: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

To manually update VM reservation, on Infrastructure > Managed Machines page hover over the VM and select Change Reservation:

This process is obviously not scalable, as it can take hours, if you have hundreds of VMs. VMware offers an alternative solution that lets you update all VMs by using Bulk Import feature available from Infrastructure > Administration > Bulk Imports. The idea is that you can export all VM configuration details in a CSV file, update compute and storage reservation columns and import back to vRA. vRealize Suite 7.0 Disaster Recovery by Using Site Recovery Manager 6.1 gives very detailed instruction on how to do that in “Bulk Import, Update, or Migrate Virtual Machines” section.

Conclusion

I hope this blog post helped to cover some gaps in VMware documentation. If you have any questions or comments, as always, feel free to leave them in the comments sections below.

References

•  vRealize Suite 7.0 Disaster Recovery by Using Site Recovery Manager 6.1
• Uniquely Identifying Virtual Machines in vSphere and vCloud Part 1: Overview
• Uniquely Identifying Virtual Machines in vSphere and vCloud Part 2: Technical

[SOLVED] Migrating vCenter Notifications

Why is this a problem?

VMware upgrades and migrations still comprise a large chunk of what I do in my job. If it is an in-place upgrade it is often more straightforward. The main consideration is making sure all compatibility checks are made. But if it is a rebuild, things get a bit more complicated.

Take for example a vCenter Server to vCenter Server Appliance migration. If you are migrating between 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5 you are covered by the vCenter Server Migration Tool. Recently I came across a customer using vSphere 5.1 (yes, it is not as uncommon as you might think). vCenter Server Migration Tool does not support migration from vSphere 5.1, which is fair enough, as it is end of support was August 2016. But as a result, you end up being on your own with your upgrade endeavours and have to do a lot of the things manually. One of such things is migrating vCenter notifications.

You can go and do it by hand. Using a few PowerCLI commands you can list the currently configured notifications and then recreate them on the new vCenter. But knowing how clunky and slow this process is, I doubt you are looking forward to spend half a day configuring each of the dozens notifications one by one by hand (I sure am not).

I offer an easy solution

You may have seen a comic over on xkcd called “Is It Worth The Time?“. Which gives you an estimate of how long you can work on making a routine task more efficient before you are spending more time than you save (across five years). As an example, if you can save one hour by automating a task that you do monthly, even if you spend two days on automating it, you will still brake even in five years.

Knowing how often I do VMware upgrades, it is well worth for me to invest time in automating it by scripting. Since you do not do upgrades that often, for you it is not, so I wrote this script for you.

If you simply want to get the job done, you can go ahead and download it from my GitHub page here (you will also need VMware PowerCLI installed on your machine for it to work) and then run it like so:

.\copy-vcenter-alerts-v1.0.ps1 -SourceVcenter old-vc.acme.com -DestinationVcenter new-vc.acme.com

Script includes help topics, that you can view by running the following command:

Get-Help -full .\copy-vcenter-alerts-v1.0.ps1

Or if you are curious, you can read further to better understand how script works.

How does this work?

First of all, it is important to understand the terminology used in vSphere:

• Alarm trigger – a set of conditions that must be met for an alarm warning and alert to occur.
• Alarm action – operations that occur in response to triggered alarms. For example, email notifications.

Script takes source and destination vCenter IP addresses or host names as parameters and starts by retrieving the list of existing alerts. Then it compares alert definitions and if alert doesn’t exist on the destination, it will be skipped, so be aware of that. Script will show you a warning and you will be able to make a decision about what to do with such alert later.

Then for each of the source alerts, that exists on the destination, script recreates actions, with exact same triggers. Trigger settings, such as repeats (enabled/disabled) and trigger state changes (green to yellow, yellow to red, etc) are also copied.

Script will not attempt to recreate an action that already exists, so feel free to run the script multiple times, if you need to.

What script does not do

1. Script does not copy custom alerts – if you have custom alert definitions, you will have to recreate them manually. It was not worth investing time in such feature at this stage, as custom alerts are rare and even if encountered, there us just a handful, that can be moved manually.
2. Only email notification actions are supported – because they are the most common. If you use other actions, like SNMP traps, let me know and maybe I will include them in the next version.

PowerCLI cmdlets used

These are some of the useful VMware PowerCLI cmdlets I used to write the script:

• Get-AlarmDefinition
• Get-AlarmAction
• Get-AlarmActionTrigger
• New-AlarmAction
• New-AlarmActionTrigger

Extracting vRealize Operations Data Using REST API

Scripting today is an important skill if you’re a part of IT operations team. It is common to use PowerShell or any other scripting language of your choice to automate repetitive tasks and be efficient in what you do. Another use case for scripting and automation, which is often missed, is the fact that they let you do more. Public APIs offered by many software and hardware solutions let you manipulate their data and call functions in the way you need, without being bound by the workflows provided in GUI.

Recently I was asked to extract data from vRealize Operations Manager that was not available in GUI or a report in the format I needed. At first it looked like a non-trivial task as it required scripting and using REST APIs to pull the data. But after some research it turned out to be much easier than I thought.

Using Python this can be done in a few lines of code using existing Python libraries that do most of the work for you. The goal of this blog post is to show that scripting does not have to be hard and using the right tools for the right job you can get things done in a matter of minutes, not hours or days.

Scenario

To demonstrate an example of using vRealize Operations Manager REST APIs we will retrieve the list of vROps adapters, which vROps uses to pull information from many hardware and software solutions it supports, such as Nimble Storage or Microsoft SQL Server.

vROps APIs are obviously much more powerful than that and you can use the same approach to pull other information such as: active and inactive alerts, performance statistics, recommendations. Full vROps API documentation can be found at https://your-vrops-hostname/suite-api/.

Install Python and Libraries

We will be using two Python libraries: “Requests” to make REST calls and “ElementTree” for XML parsing. ElementTree comes with Python, so we will need to install the Requests package only.

I already made a post here on how to install Python interpreter and Python libraries, so we will dive right into vROps APIs.

Retrieve the List of vROps Adapters

To get the list of all installed vROps adapters we need to make a GET REST call using the “get” method from Requests library:

import requests
from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth

akUrl = 'https://vrops/suite-api/api/adapterkinds'
ak = requests.get(akUrl, auth=HTTPBasicAuth('user', 'pass'))

In this code snippet using the “import” command we specify that we are using Requests library, as well as its implementation of basic HTTP authentication. Then we request the list of vROps adapters using the “get” method from Request library, and save the XML response into the “ak” variable. Add “verify=False” to the list of the get call parameters if you struggle with SSL certificate issues.

As a result you will get the full list of vROps adapters in the format similar to the following. So how do we navigate that? Using ElementTree XML library.

Parsing XML Response Sequentially

vRealize Operations Manager returns REST API responses in XML format. ElementTree lets you parse these XML responses to find the data you need, which you can output in a human-readable format, such as CSV and then import into an Excel spreadsheet.

Parsing XML tree requires traversing from top to bottom. You start from the root element:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

akRoot = ET.fromstring(ak.content)

Then you can continue by iterating through child elements using nested loops:

for adapter in akRoot:
  print adapter.tag, adapter.attrib['key']
    for adapterProperty in adapter:
      print adapterProperty.name, adapterProperty.text

Childs of <ops:adapter-kinds> are <ops:adapter-kind> elements. Childs of <ops:adapter-kind> elements are <ops:name>, <ops:adapterKindType>, <ops:describeVersion> and <ops:resourceKinds>. So the output of the above code will be:

adapter-kind CITRIXNETSCALER_ADAPTER
name Citrix NetScaler Adapter
adapterKindType GENERAL
describeVersion 1
resourceKinds citrix_netscaler_adapter_instance
resourceKinds appliance
…

As you could’ve already noticed, all XML elements have tags and can additionally have attributes and associated text. From above example:

• Tags: adapter-kind, name, adapterKindType
• Attribute: key
• Text: Citrix NetScaler Adapter, GENERAL, 1

Finding Interesting Elements

Typically you are looking for specific information and don’t need to traverse the whole XML tree. So instead of walking through the tree sequentially, you can iterate trough interesting elements using the “iterfind” method. For instance if we are looking only for adapter names, the code would look as the following:

ns = {'vrops': 'http://webservice.vmware.com/vRealizeOpsMgr/1.0/'}
for akItem in akRoot.iterfind('vrops:adapter-kind', ns):
  akNameItem = akItem.find('vrops:name', ns)
  print akNameItem.text

All elements in REST API responses are usually prefixed with a namespace. To avoid using the long XML element names, such as http://webservice.vmware.com/vRealizeOpsMgr/1.0/adapter-kind, ElementTree methods support using namespaces, that can be then passed as a variable, as the “ns” variable in this code snippet.

Resulting output will be similar to:

Citrix NetScaler Adapter
Container
Dell EMC PowerEdge
Dell Storage Adapter
EP Ops Adapter
F5 BIG-IP Adapter
HP Servers Adapter

Additional Information

I intentionally tried to keep this post short to give you all information required to start using Python to parse REST API responses in XML format.

I have written two scripts that are more practical and shared them on my GitHub page here:

• vrops_object_types_1.0.py – extracts adapters, object types and number of objects. Script gives you an idea of what is actually being monitored in vROps, by providing the number of objects you have in your vROps instance for each adapter and object type.
• vrops_alert_definitions_1.0.py – extracts adapters, object types, alert names, criticality and impact. As opposed to the first script, this script provides the list of alerts for each adapter and object type, which is helpful to identify potential alerts that can be triggered in vROps.

Feel free to download these scripts from GitHub and play with them or adapt them according to your needs.

Helpful Links

• vRealize Operations Manager API Programming Guide
• The ElementTree XML API
• Requests: HTTP for Humans

vSphere 6 Dump / Syslog Collector: PowerCLI Script

This is a quick update for a post I previously wrote on configuring vSphere 5 Syslog and Network Dump Collectors. You can find it here. This post will be about the changes in version 6.

Scripts I reposted for version 5 no longer work for version 6, so I thought I’d do an update. If you’re looking just for the updated scripts, simply scroll down to the end of the post.

What’s new in vSphere 6

If you look at the scripts all that’s changed is the order and number of the arguments. Which is not overly exciting.

What’s more interesting is that with vSphere 6 Syslog and ESXi Dump Collectors are no longer a separate install. They’re bundled with vCenter and you won’t see them as separate line items in the vCenter installer.

What I’ve also noticed is that ESXi Dump Collector service is not started automatically, so make sure to go to the services on the vCenter VM and start it manually.

Dump Collector vCenter plugin doesn’t seem to exist any more as well. But you are still able to see Syslog Collector settings in vCenter.

Another thing worth mentioning here is also the directories where the logs and dumps are kept. In vCenter 6 they can be found by these paths:

C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\data\vmsyslogcollector

C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\data\netdump\Data

 

PowerShell Get-EsxCli Cmdlet

Also want to quickly touch on the fact that the below scripts are written using the Get-EsxCli cmdlet to get a EsxCli object and then directly invoke its methods.  Which I find not very ideal, as it’s not clear what each of the arguments actually mean and because the script gets broken every time the number or order of the arguments changes. Which is exactly what’s happened here.

There are Set-VMHostSyslogConfig and Set-VMHostDumpCollector cmdlets, which use argument names such as -SyslogServer and -Protocol, which are self explanatory. I may end up rewriting these scripts if I have time. But at the end of the day both ways will get the job done.

Maybe one hint is if you’re lost and not sure about the order of the arguments, run this cmdlet on a EsxCli object to find out what each argument actually mean:

$esxcli.system.coredump.network | Get-Member

ESXi Dump Collector PowerCLI script:

Foreach ($vmhost in (get-vmhost))
{
$esxcli = Get-EsxCli -vmhost $vmhost
$esxcli.system.coredump.network.get()
}

Foreach ($vmhost in (get-vmhost))
{
$esxcli = Get-EsxCli -vmhost $vmhost
$esxcli.system.coredump.network.set($null, “vmk0”, $null, “10.10.10.10”, 6500);
$esxcli.system.coredump.network.set($true)
}

There are a couple commands to check the ESXi Dump Collector configuration, as it’s not always clear if it’s able to write a core dump until a PSOD actually happens.

First command checks if Dump Collector service on a ESXi host can connect to the Dump Collector server and the second one actually forces ESXi host to purple screen if you want to be 100% sure that a core dump is able to be written. Make sure to put the ESXi host into maintenance mode if you want to go that far.

# esxcli system coredump network check

# vsish
# set /reliability/crashMe/Panic

Syslog Collector PowerCLI script:

Foreach ($vmhost in (get-vmhost))
{
$esxcli = Get-EsxCli -vmhost $vmhost
$esxcli.system.syslog.config.get()
}

Foreach ($vmhost in (get-vmhost))
{
$esxcli = Get-EsxCli -vmhost $vmhost
$esxcli.system.syslog.config.set($null, $null , $null, $null, $null, $null, $null, $null, “udp://vcenter.domain.local:514”, $null, $null);
$esxcli.network.firewall.ruleset.set($null, $true, “syslog”)
$esxcli.system.syslog.reload()
}

For the Syslog Collector it’s important to remember that there’s a firewall rule on each ESXi host, which needs to be enabled (the firewall ruleset command in the script).

For the Dump Collector there’s no firewall rule. So if you looking for it and can’t find, it’s normal to not have it by default.

Moving Active Directory roaming profiles to another server

Relocating Active Directory roaming profiles can be a tricky task. You have many shared folders with particular permissions which won’t move unlike NTFS permissons to another server if you simply copy these folders. On top of that, you need to change profile paths in Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. And if you have hundreds of users it’s not what you will happy to do. Given these two objectives lets move on to implementation.

Moving shares preserving permissions

I ran into several suggestions how to do that, like using robocopy, xcopy, permcopy or other tools. I don’t know to what extent they might help. I’d like to suggest simpler solution. Microsoft has  File Server Migration Toolkit (FSMT). It’s very basic and limited tool. It means you will probably need to do some hand work. But it solves the primary problem which is copying shares along with their permissions.

FSMT has additional feature of creating DFS links for you but I didn’t use it. GUI is rather intuitive, so there is not much to explain. The particular problem with FSMT is that it changes target share and folder paths. Say you have share with the name ~UNAME$ which is located on server CONTOSO_PDC. As a result of movement you will have share with the name ~UNAME$_contoso_pdc$. Which is not what we expect to have in our case. Same thing for target folder. For example, if the source folder for the share is D:\Profiles\UNAME, after migration you’ll get D:\Profiles\contoso_pdc\~UNAME$. Apart from additional folder in between, as you can see last part of source path is changed to share name in the target path (~UNAME$ instead of UNAME).

In my case I had to revert all these changes back to what it originally was. The trick here is to create FSMT project, add server and shares to it and then exit without performing the actual move. Then open project .xml file and correct all paths by search/replace. Since I had complicated share names I had to use replace with substitution feature in MS Office Word. For example to change target path from D:\Shared\~PROF\~UNAME$ to D:\Shared\~PROF\UNAME I used following masks for search and replace:

D:\\Shared\\~USER\\\~(*)\$

D:/Shared/~USER/\1

Here word processor searches for the first string and use word from parenthesis as the substitution for the special sequence \1.

Changing profile paths in Active Directory

Here you also have several ways to accomplish that. You can use ADModify tool. But I simply wrote a Powershell script which I share with you as it is. I believe it’s mostly self-explanatory. For convenience I also uploaded this script to FileDen. Download it from here.

# Bind to the root of the current domain
$ldapPath = "LDAP://ou=Users and Computers,dc=contoso,dc=com"
$objDomain = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry($ldapPath)

$objSearcher = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher
$objSearcher.SearchRoot = $objDomain
$objsearcher.Filter = ("(objectCategory=User)")
$colResult = $objSearcher.FindAll()

foreach($objResult in $colResult) {
	$user = $objResult.GetDirectoryEntry()
	write-host "For user" $user.cn ":"

	$profilePath = $user.ProfilePath
	$parts = $profilePath.ToString().Split("\")

	# Identifying profile type (XP = 0 or Windows 7 = 1)
	if($parts.Length -eq 4) { $profType = 0 }
	elseif($parts.Length -eq 5) { $profType = 1 }

	# Constructing new profile paths
	if($profilePath) {
		if($profType -eq 0) {
			$newProfPath = "\\SERVERNAME\" + $parts[3];
			$newProfDirPath = "D:\~PROF\" + $user.sAMAccountName
			$newProfShareName = $parts[3]
		}
		# Windows 7 profiles do not have individual shares. There is
		# one share for all roaming profiles.
		elseif($profType -eq 1) {
			$newProfPath = "\\SERVERNAME\Profiles\" + $parts[4]
		}
	}

	# Constructing new home directory paths
	$homeDirectory = $user.homeDirectory
	$parts = $homeDirectory.ToString().Split("\")
	if($homeDirectory) {
		$newHomePath = "\\SERVERNAME\" + $parts[3];
		$newHomeDirPath = "D:\~USER\" + $user.sAMAccountName
		$newHomeShareName = $parts[3]

	}

	if($profilePath) {
		# Changing profile path
		write-host "Changing profile path from" `
			$user.ProfilePath "to" $newProfPath
		$user.ProfilePath = $newProfPath
	}
	if($homeDirectory) {
		# Changing home directory path
		write-host "Changing home directory path from" `
			$user.homeDirectory "to" $newHomePath
		$user.homeDirectory = $newHomePath
	}
	# Commit changes
	$user.setinfo()
}

PowerShell script for disk space

I’ve written simple PowerShell script for monitoring of free space on one of our important volumes. As well as inserting it as plaint text below, for the sake of convenience I uploaded the script as a text file on FileDen file hosting service. Here is the link to the file.

$path = "F:\script\dspace.txt"
Clear-Content $path
$server = "SERVERNAME"
$recps = "qwe@contoso.com", "wer@contoso.com", "ert@contoso.com"
$sender = "alerts@contoso.com"
$user = "alerts"
$passw = "123456"
$thold = 3
$drives = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $server Win32_LogicalDisk | `
Where-Object {$_.DriveType -eq 3}
$i = 0

echo "This message is to inform you that server $server is low on disk space.
Please carry out corrective actions. Find details below. `n" >> $path

foreach($drive in $drives) {
	$size_gb = $drive.size / 1GB
	$size_gb_fmt = "{0:N2}" -f $size_gb
	$free_gb = $drive.freespace / 1GB
	$free_gb_fmt = "{0:N2}" -f $free_gb
	$ID = $drive.DeviceID
	$pct = $free_gb / $size_gb * 100
	$pct_fmt = "{0:N0}" -f $pct

	if (($ID -eq "F:") -and ($free_gb -lt $thold)) {
		echo "Server Name: $server" >> $path
		echo "Drive Letter: $ID" >> $path
		echo "Drive Size: $size_gb_fmt GB" >> $path
		echo "Free Space: $free_gb_fmt GB" >> $path
		echo "Percent Free: $pct_fmt%" >> $path
		$i++
        }
}

if ($i -gt 0) {
	$smtpServer = "mail.contoso.com"
	$smtp = New-Object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($smtpServer)
	$smtp.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential($user, $passw)
	$msg = new-object Net.Mail.MailMessage
	$msg.From = $sender
	foreach ($recp in $recps) {
		$msg.To.Add($recp)
	}
	$subject = "Disk space on $server is under $thold GB"
	$msg.Subject = $subject
	foreach ($line in Get-Content $path) {
		$body += "$line `n"
	}
	$msg.Body = $body
	$smtp.Send($msg)
}

To run this script from scheduler just write another simple .bat file with following line inside:

powershell -command “& ‘.\dspace.ps1′”