Search for VM Snapshots from the Service Console

Posted on June 25th, 2008 in esx, how to, scripts by Rich

There are several ways to determine if you have virtual machines with snapshots. Why you would want to know has been covered In various other posts both here at VM /ETC as well as on the other virtualization blogs. It’s so important that the virtualization community has created different tools and scripts to identify and monitor snapshot files for administrators.  So, when I read the post WWoIT - Wayne’s World of IT: Find VM snapshots in ESX/VC I had an experience that Aaron Delp described as “/HEADDESK” (when he commented on my uploading files with the VI Client post).

It may not be the fanciest of methods, but probably the quickest way to find VM snapshots is to use the ls command from the ESX Service Console. By piping the output with grep to find files with the snapshot extension, .vmsn, and using the recursive switch you can scan all the VMFS LUNs visible to an ESX host. That’s so simple it hurts!

To use the ls command to find snapshots do the following:

Configure PortGroup settings across all ESX hosts simultaneously

Posted on May 31st, 2008 in esx3.5, how to, scripts, vc2.5, vi3 by Rich

VI3 Enterprise features VMotion, DRS, and HA require identical virtual networking settings on all of your ESX hosts. Unfortunately, VirtualCenter does not apply a central configuration policy or inheritance of settings from the cluster. Maybe a future version of VirtualCenter will evolve to include global configuration abilities? Until such a version is created, each ESX server’s virtual networking settings will continue to be configured individually by most administrators. However, there are some time saving, global configuration options available today. This post summarizes two methods provided by the virtualization community for creating PortGroups simultaneously across multiple ESX hosts.

FREE Disk space monitoring solutions for VMware virtual infrastructure

Posted on April 14th, 2008 in how to, scripts, storage, vc2, vc2.5, vi3 by Rich

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.

Windows GUI for Storage VMotion

Posted on February 9th, 2008 in blogs, esx3.5, how to, scripts, storage vmotion, vc2.5 by Rich

Alexander Gaiswinklers svmotion gui - screenshot from Eric SloofAnother improvement alternative to the cumbersome storage vmotion feature has been made by the user community. I am assuming (and hoping) that one day soon we will all be announcing (and celebrating) the patch that includes the native VC 2.5 ability to call and configure storage vmotion from the VI Client, but until VMware does that the user community can be counted on to continue to make the process easier.

Graphical Front-End for Storage VMotion - blog.scottlowe.org is where I found out about Alexander Gaiswinkler’s post in the VMware Communities announcing his GUI for SVMotion. Installation instructions from Alexander’s post:

Script to clean up Virtual Center database

Posted on February 1st, 2008 in how to, scripts, vc2, vc2.5, vmware by Rich

I was directed to a VMware Knowledge Base article about a script for cleaning up the VC database while upgrading to VC2.5. The company had about 18 months worth of data in their VC SQL database and wanted to preserve some recent historical data, but didn’t need to keep all of it. Purging data helped free disk space and reduce the time the upgrade actually took to complete.

The VMware article links to scripts for both

Storage VMotion the easy way

Posted on January 28th, 2008 in blogs, how to, scripts, storage vmotion, vmotion by Rich

While doing some research to get ready to implement the new ESX 3.5 storage vmotion feature I came across some helpful blog posts, and a script that will be a real time saver.

Unlike the vmotion we are used to, you can not right click on a vm in the vi client and initiate a storage vmotion. You have to download VMware-VIRemoteCLI and install it. The VIRemoteCLI can be downloaded as:

* a virtual appliance
* a windows installer
* a linux installer

Once the RemoteCLI is installed in Windows for example,

Script for VM migration without Virtual Center

Posted on January 3rd, 2008 in SAN, scripts, storage, vConverter, vmware by Rich

VMware Communities: New Script for moving vm to another … contains a thread from this summer about cold migrating a VM from local storage of an ESX server to iSCSI storage. The post contains the code (original and updated versions) for a script to automate this process. The final version allows the migration of a VM to any ESX storage location. I have added the vm-relocate.sh script to the Files page as well.

This script is handy if you do not have

Use vmclone.pl script to clone virtual machines

Posted on December 29th, 2007 in V2V, esx, gold image, how to, scripts, vmware by Rich

I stumbled across another interesting Perl script. Paul Gregg - Projects - VMware ESX vmclone.p is a web page that explains the vmclone.pl script which automates cloning a virtual machine. Not a big deal if you have Virtual Center, but for those environments where you have stand alone ESX hosts this script can make life a little easier.

From the web page and the notes of the script: