VM /ETC

VMware VirtualCenter comes with built in alerting and a handful of alerts preconfigured. Unfortunately, alerting for disk space usage of either the ESX hosts or the virtual machines is not included. Administrators continue to use common physical infrastructure monitoring and reporting applications such as NetIQ and MOM for VMs, or SNMP capable programs like HP Openview or IBM Director for ESX host monitoring. A less complex and less expensive ( cost of installing and configuring agents on each VM OS ) alternative would be to tap into VirtualCenter’s central management ability to monitor, alert, and report on disk space. This post lists a few free solutions that can already use VC2.x or quickly be configured for ESX hosts and therefore save administrators time and money. Hopefully, a future feature of VC2.x will include vital disk space metrics and alerting.

VM DiskFree Example

From run-virtual.com, VM DiskFree Example is a post that contains a downloadable script that will report VM disk space usage displayed in VirtualCenter via the VI Perl Toolkit.

“My example program reads out the information about all running virtual machines and report the information in a custom field. The program automatically creates the custom fields if they do not exists yet, so all you have to do is set the right username, password and ip to your virtual center and run the script (on a system that has the VI Perl Toolkit installed).”

Run-virtual.com also has a handy guide for installing the VI Perl Toolkit on Windows.

For more about the VI Perl Toolkit go to VMware’s VI Perl Toolkit web page where you can get the release notes, documentation, and the download link.

If you want to take the Perl scripting to the next level, check out baeke.info’s Combining the VI3 Perl Toolkit, PowerShell and PowerGadgets which also uses a VM disk space example.

MCS Storageview 1.0.3

On the MightyCare.de downloads page http://www.mightycare.de/downloads/task,cat_view/gid,16/ is the free tool MCS Storageview 1.0.3. This tool downloads ready to use needing only the files contained in the .zip. Extract the tool and it’s supporting files to a thumb drive and use it for multiple hosts at multiple locations.

“Another great Tool from Mightycare to display the logical Partitions of all virtual Machines on VMware ESX 3.x or Virtual Center 2.x . The Tool can display how many Gigabyte the Customer can save when he decrease the logical partition to a size the VM really need. It is Freeware.”

Although the primary function of this tool is not monitoring and alerting, it is still useful as a centralized report of VM disk space as seen from VC or from an ESX host.

The direct download link is http://www.mightycare.de/downloads/task,doc_download/gid,8/

Checking the diskspace on your VMFS volumes

Checking the diskspace on your VMFS volumes is a post on yellow-bricks.com that contains a script for monitoring your ESX host disk free space.

“On a regular basis I noticed that people forget to monitor the free diskspace of their VMFS volumes. I created a script that can easily be scheduled with crontab and mailed with smtp_send. You can send it as an html based email if you setup MIME correctly. (For more info on how to set this up, check this blog) The script creates an html file with a table in which the necessary info is dumped, if a VMFS volume has less than 10% free space that specific line will be yellow and if it’s less than 5% than that line will be red… So a helpdesk should be able to monitor it and warn you in case it runs or will run out of diskspace.”

In another example of how the virtualization community took a great script to the next level, scalethemind.com took the host based script from yellow-bricks.com and turned it into a centralized script to be run from a single Linux server. From the post Script – Checking ESX Disk Space Usage from a Central Linux Box:

“The concept of the original script was to run the script locally on each ESX box through cron and then send an email of the results. In my experiences, I have found locally run cron scripts to be a bit of maintenance pain (for the most part, there are some exceptions).

That being said, I have updated the script to run from a central linux box. There are some caveats to the script:

• The script expects SSH key authentication to be working (RTFM has a quick guide here for those who aren’t familiar)
• By default, the script will look for a file called ‘esx_hosts.txt’ in the same directory as the script. This file should contain a list of the ESX hosts you want to query (one per line)
• The results of the script will be saved to /var/log/esx_disk_check_results.html
• By default, the script will try to send the results by email using smtp_send.pl. You will need to update the last line of the script to include your email address, the desired from address, and your mail relay server. If you aren’t familiar with smtp_send.pl, you can find more info here.

I haven’t had the time, but there are a number of enhancements that could be made to this script (command line arguments, proper error handling, variable notification, etc.).

You can get the modified version of the script here.”

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