2011-12-29

Internet Access is needed to Install vCLI 5.0

I came a cross a case this week that I thought would be worthwhile sharing.

A client needed to install the vCLI on a Linux machine, and this machine was behind a firewall that was blocking access to the internet.

image

The process was supposed to be very simple. Download the Tarball, copy it to the machine, untar and then install. But during the install this message popped up:

Do you accept? (yes/no) yes

Thank you.

ping: unknown host www.vmware.com
Network is unavailable, please configure the network first otherwise please
install the following modules manually for use by vSphere CLI:

Archive::Zip 1.20 or newer
Compress::Zlib 2.005 or newer
Compress::Raw::Zlib 2.017 or newer
version 0.78 or newer
IO::Compress::Base 2.005 or newer
IO::Compress::Zlib::Constants 2.005 or newer
Class::MethodMaker 2.10 or newer
HTML::Parser 3.60 or newer
UUID 0.03 or newer
Data::Dump 1.15 or newer
SOAP::Lite 0.710.08 or newer
URI 1.37 or newer
LWP 5.805 or newer
LWP::Protocol::https 5.805 or newer
VMware::VIRuntime 0.9 or newer
WSMan::StubOps 0.1 or newer

Ok I get it – the installation wanted access to the web that would download those modules. Due to my predicament with no internet on this machine – I downloaded the all the Perl modules on another machine and copied them over.

And by the way the easiest way to download the modules is by using CPAN, but in this case - they had to be downloaded and installed manually – which by the way this is the process:

  • Download the Module
  • Unpack the tarball
  • cd <package_name>
  • perl Makefile.PL
  • make
  • make test
  • make install

But even after installing the dependencies – vCLI still would not install – either it would ask for a proxy – or throw a message simlar to the one below.

SOAP::Lite 0.710.08 or newer
LWP 5.805 or newer
LWP::Protocol::https 5.805 or newer
VMware::VIRuntime 0.9 or newer
WSMan::StubOps 0.1 or newer

Thanks to William Lam – he pointed me to a workaround that allows for the installation to continue without internet access. 

The solution is to comment out a few lines in the install script – which will allow the installation to continue. I understand that there is already a feature request to change this behavior in the next version.

2011-12-21

Mercedes Benz and BYOD

I spent a week in meetings with our global IT group in the UK last month. It is always good to see the people face to face that you interact with on a regular basis and build those personal connections. It makes working together a lot easier and more productive.

During our time there, we had an outdoor activity at Mercedes Benz World. But first I have a confessions to make.

I have never driven a Mercedes Benz – because of the amount of taxes that we pay here in Israel on cars – a Mercedes is way too expensive – well all cars are expensive.. but a Mercedes even more so. So driving one was a great experience.

Mercedes Benz World was built on old race track – which was in turn converted into a airstrip during WWII and now is being partially used as a track again.

So we got to drive a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG - Man what a car!! The sheer power of this machine is unbelievable. Going from 0-100 km/h in under 4 seconds – it feels like you are taking off in an airplane. What also amazed me was the fact that it could also go from 100km/h –> 0 in less than 2. This car can stop on a dime. We tried the skid tracks – and with all the safety features – and also with the safety features turned off as well. It was a lot of fun.

The second part was an off track course that we ran through with a …….. At one point we crossed a obstacle and the car was balancing on 2 wheels – yes only two – the front right and the back left and it bounced from one side of the obstacle to the other. Scary as hell but utterly amazing.

Benz1

Benz2

You are probably wondering by now – why is he writing about all this? What does this have to do with virtualization an modern IT? Well I had a light bulb moment.

Traditional IT is changing. We are faced with challenges that we have never faced before. Our users are used to having things at their fingertips. They need resources – they go to a cloud provider and order something on their credit card – circumventing IT completely. People want their corporate email on their personal devices, on their iPad, their tablet, their phone. They want to access the corporate network from anywhere in the world.

And not always can the IT department keep up. We are looking to have things controlled, secure, safe. Sometimes that is not fast enough for the evolving world. There are those in IT that are afraid of becoming irrelevant. We cannot always provide a cloud infrastructure that can compete with external providers in such a way that will be viable for our company – for a number of reasons.

  • Cost
  • Space
  • Process
  • Security

So what was the light bulb moment you may ask? Actually two.

  1. When seeing that car balancing on two wheels – you come to realize a car can do so much more than you think it can. So can we – we should just have faith in ourselves and we can accomplish so much more than we think can.
  2. Mercedes Benz introduced almost every safety feature in modern cars we know today ABS, ESP, airbags, Collision testing and Safety Zones – well a lot. The car can do unbelievable things, take corners that you would usually flip over multiple times in a regular car. Avoid objects in the middle of the road, because of the additional sensors that control the car.
    You can do crazy things in Mercedes, but the car – because of all the technology inside will keep you safe and stop you from killing yourself (and others as well). Because of this we trust the car – it will keep us from harm. Even if we make a mistake – it will correct it and keep us from harm.
    We always have the option of doing something stupid – like turning off the safety features – but then we are on our own.

We as IT professionals should be the same. We have to learn to give our users the flexibility and the leeway they need – but have the measures in place to keep them and the company - safe and secure. If they do something that is not safe for them – the tools should be in place to protect them – sometimes without them even knowing it.

They surf somewhere shady on the web – we have filters in place that block these kind of sites – to protect not only them – but everyone else. They get a suspicious attachment – we clean it out before they even get it.

We have learned to trust a Mercedes – because of its reputation and its credibility. For our users to trustimage IT – and not see us as an obstacle – as a nuisance – as not relevant – we have to build up such a reputation and maintain that credibility. Some people feel that if it were up to IT we would be riding around in a Ford Model T, but that is because we have a bigger responsibility to the entire company. Opening up all bittorrent sites to the whole company – just because that one user needs a file on bittorrent – perhaps is not the best way to do things

BYOD is here, and there is no stopping it – otherwise IT as we know it will no longer be relevant. We just have to adapt much faster than before.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of a Happy Chanukkah and a Happy holidays.

As always comments are more than welcome.

2011-12-19

vKernel vOPS 4.5 Launched

vKernel announced the release of version 4.5 of their vOperations Suite today.
What’s New:
  • New Automation Features - vOPS' automation capabilities are enhanced with auto-deletion of abandoned VM images, auto-merging of unused snapshots, an additional automated remediation for performance issues and auto-calculation of future resource requirements.
  • Automation Controls - vOPS 4.5 also adds the ability to more finally control some automation processes. For example, VMs can be grouped, and then these groups set with minimum and maximum resource amounts that automated right-sizing will respect.
  • vSphere 5 New Feature Support - vOPS 4 introduced compatability to vSphere 5. vOPS 4.5 takes this integration further with support for storage DRS and storage clusters, new HA methods and inclusion of data provided by the VASA storage interface.
vKernel will try to provide “trusted automation” – and with vOPS 4.5, data center staff will be able to automatically
  • Delete abandoned VMDK Files
  • Merge VM snapshots
  • Solve VM performance issues
  • Power-off Zombie VMs
  • Resize vCPU and VM memory resources based on vOPS’ recommendations
  • Update management dashboards in real-time in external systems
  • Calculate CPU, memory and storage requirements at any point in the future
Each one of these automation features will help avoid the need to hire in additional administrators as environments grow. For example, a VM administrator can manually delete approximately 60 abandoned VM images in one hour. With automated deletion of abandoned VM images, an unlimited amount of files can be deleted in seconds.

Other features available in vOPS 4.5 include:
  • Application type tags to denote which application is running inside a virtual machine
  • Storage DRS and storage cluster support (available in VMware vSphere 5)
  • Access to VMware VASA interface storage statistics available in vSphere 5
  • Capacity planning calculation adjustments for vSphere 5 HA methods
  • Improved support and visibility into Raw Device Mapping (RDM) storage objects
  • Additional management reports such as graphs for performance issue counts
  • Auto-set VM metric trend alarms that generate warnings when abnormalities are detected
Here is a short video on the new features.
What’s new in vOPS 4.5

2011-12-09

VMware AppSpeed to be Retired


This is the excerpt of a message I received yesterday.(the highlights and graphics are my own)

Dear Maish,

We want to provide you with an important update about the VMware® vCenter AppSpeed™ product. As customers continue to expand the use of virtualization and cloud resources, we are focusing on delivering management solutions that can support the flexibility that enterprises require. As a result of this focus, we have decided not to produce additional releases of vCenter AppSpeed. vCenter AppSpeed will be end of availability for new license purchases as of January 3, 2012, however it will continue to be supported through September 15, 2012, in line with our General Support Policy.

image

As part of VMware continued investment in our customers' journey to cloud computing, we have developed a more comprehensive application performance management solution, VMware® vFabric™ Application Performance Manager (APM). As a customer of vCenter AppSpeed, we would like to offer you a special opportunity to leverage the comprehensive capabilities of vFabric APM. Customers who are active on a Support and Subscription (SnS) plan from December 1, 2011 until the vFabric APM entitlement becomes available in early January 2012 may exchange their related licenses of vCenter AppSpeed and upgrade to vFabric APM at no additional license cost. This upgrade will take place on a one-to-one basis. Future purchases of SnS for vFabric APM will have a higher list price than SnS for AppSpeed because APM provides significantly more application performance management functionality and has a higher license cost than VMware vCenter AppSpeed, however, SnS costs will not rise prior to customer’s next SnS term. Learn more about VMware vFabric APM.

image

AppSpeed was a technology the VMware acquired back in 2008 from a B-hive Networks.

The product as you see from the mail above, is to be retired and incorporated into the bigger suite of VMware vFabric Product family.

2011-12-06

Restarting vCenter Services - with PowerShell

Has it ever happened that you need to restart a vCenter service? I guess that you have been there before. Once upon a time I wrote a post that mentioned that there are not enough tools available today for us to troubleshoot the vCenter service which usually ends in a restart of the vCenter service.

When you want to stop the vCenter service you will notice that there are several services that depend on the vpxd service so they also need to be stopped. Windows will prompt you for this, of course.

Dependencies Prompt

But Windows will not start these services again automatically when you start the vCenter service.

For vCenter 4.x - it is the VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices (vctomcat) service

That was actually easy to get.

Get-Service -ComputerName vcenter.maishsk.local -Name vpxd | select -ExpandProperty DependentServices | ft -AutoSize
vCenter 4.x

vCenter 5.x there are two additional services.

vCenter 5.x

So that means when you restart a vCenter 5.0 Service then you have to restart another 3 services as well.

PowerShell again to the rescue - and the Restart-vCenterServices function

Function Restart-vCenterServices {
	$services= @() 
	$services += (Get-Service -Name vpxd).Name
	## Add the dependencies to the variable.
	(Get-Service -Name vpxd).DependentServices | ForEach-Object {
		$services += $_.Name
	}
	## First put the services in the correct order and then stop them 
	$services | Sort-Object | ForEach-Object {
		Write-Host Stopping $_
		## -Force was used because the services have dependencies - even though they are stopped
		Get-Service $_ | Stop-Service -Force
		sleep 5
	}
	sleep 5
	## We need to start the services in reverse order 
	$services | Sort-Object -Descending | ForEach-Object {
		Write-Host Starting $_
		Get-Service $_ | Start-Service
		sleep 5
	}
}

This function was written so that it would work for both versions of vCenter.

Hope you enjoyed the ride…