I have done some posts on using PowerShell actions in vWire and have generally shared scripts that give basic functionality to do things like start and stop a virtual machine and other scripts to help gather more information like returning the contents of a log file, for example.... Read more »
People make a lot of jokes about "herding cats," and when I decided to video a group of our vWire developers for them to talk about their favorite vWire features, I worried it would be hard to get what are often considered the most introverted demographic in the world in front of... Read more »
We have had OpsCheck and ConfigCheck up over on vWire.com since the site was launched but we have noticed a trend. A little less than half of the people who click on the buttons to get the tools don't actually download it. There has always been a form in front of the download... Read more »
My father recently underwent a stress test to determine how his heart performed under load. The result was that he needed a pacemaker. Tripwire's performance analysis team recently put vWire through a series of stress tests to determine how it would perform under load.
I w... Read more »
Today’s topic is working with PowerShell in vWire to enter and exit Maintenance Mode. If you do not have vWire installed yet you can download it here. Once you have vWire installed you will notice that there is a script action to exit Maintenance Mode. When writing scripts for entering and exiting Maintenance Mode, exiting is by far the easiest to do. Let’s take a look at the code to Exit Maintenance Mode.
The first step is to loop through the piped $input to get the name of each of the VMware ESX hosts that you want to exit Maintenance Mode. Once we have the name then we set the state of the host to Connected which will cause the host to exit Maintenance Mode.
Let’s take a quick look at all the options the -State switch will offer us:
If the State parameter is specified as Connected, then:
- if the host is currently connected and not in maintenance mode, does nothing.
- if the host is in maintenance mode, exits the maintenance mode.
- if the host is not connected or not responding, tries to reconnect.
If the State parameter is specified as Disconnected, then:
- if the host is currently connected, attempts to disconnect.
- if the host is not connected or not responding, does nothing.
If State is specified as Maintenance, then:
- if the host is currently connected and not in maintenance mode, enters maintenance mode.
- if the host is currently connected and in maintenance mode, does nothing.
- if the host is not connected or not responding, attempts to reconnect and enter maintenance mode.
If you notice, vWire does not ship with an action to Enter Maintenance Mode. I built a quick down and dirty script or action to perform this task. You can download this action here from the community content section to be able to import into your vWire installation. Entering Maintenance mode actually requires a few more steps to work properly. Let’s look at the code and see what is involved.
Notice that the first step is to get a list of all the VMware ESX hosts in the cluster. From there we will loop through the piped $input looking for each VMware ESX Server. Now, before we can enter Maintenance Mode, we will need to vMotion all the running virtual machines from the host we are performing the action on. In the code $vSRV is the name of the VMware ESX host that we are working to put into Maintenance Mode and we want to make sure we use all the other VMware ESX servers in the cluster to migrate the virtual machines to. The -cnotmatch switch will do just that to make sure the ESX hosts we got from the Get-VMHost command is not the name of the host we are working on
Now the script can migrate all the running virtual machines to all the other hosts in the cluster and then will enter Maintenance Mode successfully.
Since we launched vWire at the beginning of the month I have been asked a few times how to help people get their PowerShell scripts to work with vWire. This post is going to answer that question and give examples that you will need to make this happen. The first thing that you need to know is that vWire works by pipelining the information to PowerShell. PowerShell will accept this input in the form of the variable $input. Let me give you a quick example that should help make better sense of this. Let’s look at the code to start virtual machines.
Foreach ($vm in (get-vm))
{
Start-VM -VM $vm -confirm:$false
}
In this example I use a foreach loop to get all the names of the virtual machines that the command “get-vm” returns and puts it in the $vm variable. Each different virtual machine name is looped through the Start-VM command until all virtual machines have been started. The -confirm:$false switch is so that we do not get prompted to confirm we want to perform this action or start the virtual machines.
Now let’s look at the same code that would work in vWire
Notice that the object type is set to “Virtual Machine.” This lets vWire know what object this action or script will be used against. If you wrote an action for the hosts then the object type would be Hosts. You have the choice to select:
1.DataCenter
2.Cluster
3.Host
4.VM
5. Snapshots
6. Resource Pool
7. Cluster Objects (i.e. affinity rules)
8. Device Objects (i.e. vCDROM, vNic ect)
9. Management Objects (i.e. VC Folders ect)
10. Storage Objects (SCSI LUN)
11. VM Object (Current Snapshots)
This should give you enough information to get started and take a peek at the power you have with vWire. For more information on vWire you can check out the vWire Community and to also share content with others in the community.
Time to sharpen your skills with vWire because I have heard rumors there might be a contest coming up.
I posted earlier in the week that I was going to present some scripts that are using one of the new cmdlets from the vSphere PowerCLI. The scripts today are for getting and setting time information on the ESX hosts. If you have installed vWire then you can download the action here.
Inside this xml bundle you will find three scripts to work with this time. There is one script to check and another script to set the time server settings on the VMware ESX server. Both these scripts are considered and deployed as a host based action. There is one more script that sets the time server settings from a Cluster level in vWire. If you run the cluster based time script it will set the time on all the servers in the cluster it was run against.
My good friend Eric Siebert of vSphere-land is updating his top 20 VMware Blog list, and is looking for some help deciding what his Top 5 should be. I am currently rank #18 and I would really love to move up higher in the ranks with your help. You can see the current list on his vLaunchPad, and then vote here. Below come from the original post: Now get out and vote!!!
I have a hard time picking the top blogs from the many great ones that are out there. I initially started with a top 10 and recently expanded it to the top 20 as more and more blogs have started. In this post I outline my blog selection criteria for the top 20 and it’s no easy task for me to pick them and rate them in order. Well here’s the chance for you to pick the top 5 of my top 20 blog list using this new survey form that I created. You can pick from the current top 20 which you can see on my vLaunchpad,or choose other and add one that is not on the list. The survey will be open for 2 weeks, afterwords I’ll announce the results and update my vLaunchpad accordingly. Duncan Epping from http://yellow-bricks.com has been the reigning number #1 for a while now and is a tough one to beat. So head on over to my survey and cast your vote, each position will have a weight assigned with it and they will be added up accordingly for the final results.
Within the past few weeks I have received two sales calls from vendors. This in itself isn’t too unusual because when I attend industry conferences I often sign up to get additional information. I never indicate that I have BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, or Timing) so my requests always go to the bottom of the follow-up list. Thankfully, I am rarely called by a sales person so I don’t have to explain that I am in product management and will never purchase one of their products. Read more…
This week we released OpsCheck on vWire.com for free - a tool to help ensure “VMotionability”. A number of people have come to get it which is great. Some of those people are starting to share their findings in the community.
Alan’s is one of my personal favorites because of the way he stated it originally on Twitter.
What I find interesting about this product is the wide range of need for this product. There are some people who are fairly advanced in their environments and have a pretty good handle on things. They are finding things they were not aware of before.
Then there are people who have possibly never gotten VMotion to work. You may be reading this thinking– that can’t be right – but we have talked to people that virtualization is part of their job and they have had issues for the past year getting VMotion to work. OpsCheck can help these people quickly identify what issues that are preventing VMotion and giving them the troubleshooting guidance to correct those things. One of the main technologies that sets VMWare apart from the rest currently is VMotiion. OpsCheck is a tool that should be in every VI Professionals toolbox because you should not be spending time in training or dollars on consulting for what should be a foundational piece of your VMWare deployment. Use those dollars wisely on things that should be being built upon this foundation.
Our goal at Tripwire in these free tools is to provide value where it matters. ConfigCheck and OpsCheck are the first two tools we have released because we have heard a need for these things and we have the skills to produce them quickly.
For some time now here at Tripwire there has been a team working on what has been known internally as Project Spitfire. You have seen part of this team here at the Virtual Black Hole but today is a significant coming out party for the entire team. What we announced today is the first phase of a new initiative here at Tripwire focused on virtualization management known as vWire. This is a separate line of business from Tripwire Enterprise and is entirely focused on solutions to make the VI professional’s life easier.
As part of this, today we announced that OpsCheck is now available at www.vWire.com. OpsCheck is a free tool that helps you ensure your VMotion is operational. We also today announced a new community for VI professionals. There are already lots of great discussions about OpsCheck and virtual infrastructure management within the vWire community.
Last June we released ConfigCheck to allow you to test your VI configurations agains the VMWare hardening guidelines. This great free tool is also available at vwire.com. ConfigCheck was recently rated one of the top 10 free VMWare tools over on VM/ETC.
There is lots more to come but this is a big day for us. We hope you enjoy the free tools, website and community as they have been designed in an effort to help with problems that we have been hearing from VI Professionals.
People make a lot of jokes about “herding cats,” and when I decided to video a group of our vWire developers for them to talk about their favorite vWire features, I worried it would be hard to get what are often considered the most introverted demographic in the world in front of a camera.
Not so with these guys, however. They were eager and happy to talk about the product they had spent the last several months pouring their hearts and souls into. So far, I’ve recorded three, and the first is live here: http://community.vwire.com/message/1671#1671. In this video, lead vWire developer Andrew Wagner talks about his experience with Tripwire, and how he leveraged what he knew about monitoring infrastructure from a compliance and security perspective, and how he applied this knowledge to managing virtual infrastructure in vWire. He gives a brief introduction and a short demo of what vWire monitors (which, by the way, is extraordinarily comprehensive compared to what and how virtual infrastructure is typically monitored).
Anyway, check it out, and drop Andrew a line in the community about his fantastic performance in this short (less than ten minutes) video.
For some time now here at Tripwire there has been a team working on what has been known internally as Project Spitfire. You have seen part of this team here at the Virtual Black Hole but today is a significant coming out party for the entire team. What we announced today is the first phase of a new initiative here at Tripwire focused on virtualization management known as vWire. This is a separate line of business from Tripwire Enterprise and is entirely focused on solutions to make the VI professional’s life easier.
As part of this, today we announced that OpsCheck is now available at www.vWire.com. OpsCheck is a free tool that helps you ensure your VMotion is operational. We also today announced a new community for VI professionals. There are already lots of great discussions about OpsCheck and virtual infrastructure management within the vWire community.
Last June we released ConfigCheck to allow you to test your VI configurations agains the VMWare hardening guidelines. This great free tool is also available at vwire.com. ConfigCheck was recently rated one of the top 10 free VMWare tools over on VM/ETC.
There is lots more to come but this is a big day for us. We hope you enjoy the free tools, website and community as they have been designed in an effort to help with problems that we have been hearing from VI Professionals.
Some free t-shirts are cool, and some are for polishing your car. I’ve been working with a design firm on a t-shirt that falls into the former category, so that when we pass out t-shirts at VMworld Cannes, it’ll be swag that you actually want to keep. The t-shirts will be black, they’ll have the logo for our new community that we’re building, they’ll relate to virtualization, and they’ll have some words that are so frackin’ clever people won’t be able to help themselves and they’ll have to wear them. At least, that’s the goal.
We came close to “All your VM are belong to us,” which started this huge debate as to whether this reference was too “done.” I personally think it’s timeless, and was about to make this a done deal until Dwayne Melancon gave me his idea. I won’t tell you what it was, just that it was hilarious, because Dwayne’s sense of humor tops all. To find out for yourself what t-shirt we are going with, you can get one by visiting our community (once it’s live) (be patient) (it’s coming very soon) or by visiting us at the Tripwire booth in Cannes.
AND… I’m still on the lookout for ideas! If you have any ideas for a fantastic and hilarious virtualization-themed t-shirt, drop me a line. Otherwise, uh, all your t-shirt are belong to me. And I’m not all that clever.
For some time now here at Tripwire there has been a team working on what has been known internally as Project Spitfire. You have seen part of this team here at the Virtual Black Hole but today is a significant coming out party for the entire team. What we announced today is the first phase of a new initiative here at Tripwire focused on virtualization management known as vWire. This is a separate line of business from Tripwire Enterprise and is entirely focused on solutions to make the VI professional’s life easier.
As part of this, today we announced that OpsCheck is now available at www.vWire.com. OpsCheck is a free tool that helps you ensure your VMotion is operational. We also today announced a new community for VI professionals. There are already lots of great discussions about OpsCheck and virtual infrastructure management within the vWire community.
Last June we released ConfigCheck to allow you to test your VI configurations agains the VMWare hardening guidelines. This great free tool is also available at vwire.com. ConfigCheck was recently rated one of the top 10 free VMWare tools over on VM/ETC.
There is lots more to come but this is a big day for us. We hope you enjoy the free tools, website and community as they have been designed in an effort to help with problems that we have been hearing from VI Professionals.
Virtualization has been tagged in many lists of an item that will do well in 2009 because it is cost effective in how you can use your IT dollars. For most companies, a recession or down economy does not mean that you stop spending but you spend on the most important items. Read more…
People make a lot of jokes about “herding cats,” and when I decided to video a group of our vWire developers for them to talk about their favorite vWire features, I worried it would be hard to get what are often considered the most introverted demographic in the world in front of a camera.
Not so with these guys, however. They were eager and happy to talk about the product they had spent the last several months pouring their hearts and souls into. So far, I’ve recorded three, and the first is live here: http://community.vwire.com/message/1671#1671. In this video, lead vWire developer Andrew Wagner talks about his experience with Tripwire, and how he leveraged what he knew about monitoring infrastructure from a compliance and security perspective, and how he applied this knowledge to managing virtual infrastructure in vWire. He gives a brief introduction and a short demo of what vWire monitors (which, by the way, is extraordinarily comprehensive compared to what and how virtual infrastructure is typically monitored).
Anyway, check it out, and drop Andrew a line in the community about his fantastic performance in this short (less than ten minutes) video.
When we launched OpsChecka few weeks ago, we decided to include a short registration form that had to be filled out in order to complete the download. The form didn’t ask for much, but we did want to capture some information so we could (a) learn more about the people interested in OpsCheck, and (b) deliver product-related updates to users of OpsCheck. However, only about half the number of people who clicked to download OpsCheck actually filled out the form — meaning we lost 50% of the people who expressed an interest.
We knew when we started this project that people don’t like forms (heck,Idon’t like to fill out forms either, and I’m in marketing!), but it turns out… people who might use OpsCheck REALLY REALLY don’t like forms — so much so that they would forgo the download of a useful free tool to avoid completing a form.
And you know what? That’s fair. Although it would be a marketer’s dream to know who’s downloading our tools, it’s far more important to simply get our tools out there, which is why we will be taking down the form and actually putting our free tools on free download sites as well. Honestly, if I could drop OpsCheck and ConfigCheck CDs from a plane I would do it.
There’s a balance between driving awareness and capture names/market data. And honestly, at this point for vWire - a startup within Tripwire — we need all the awareness we can get. And we won’t get much from behind a registration form.
I’m finally back from a whirlwind week at VMworld! What an incredible adventure - full of fun, new friends, also eye-opening bits of feedback in terms of what we’re doing with OpsCheck and the vWire project. Regarding OpsCheck, (besides the typical “Cool, I’ll check it out”) there were two comments at the booth that really stood out:
1. “I don’t have any problems with VMotion so why should I use OpsCheck?”
2. “I tried OpsCheck and was shocked to find I had a couple of things misconfigured.”
Both comments speak to the same thing: overconfidence! But, couple statement #1 with statement #2, and the need for something like OpsCheck really stands out, especially since VMotion is so critical to virtual environments.
Therefore, I challenge those who are confident about their VMotion configurations to test out OpsCheck anyway. OpsCheck takes just a short while to run. As one person joked at our booth… “he likes to move it move it… he likes to move it move it.” And if you like to move it, better make sure you actually can. : )
Earlier this week, I convened our product advisory team to get their input on terminology used in our upcoming product and on general usability. Their feedback was very valuable, which reconfirmed my belief that continual user feedback is essential. I was surprised to hear one member say that they are still using alpha software that we provided in late February. The product has evolved so much since then that I now consider the alpha software to be pretty limited. However, this one member says his team uses it consistently and it has cut some of their tasks down from hour to minutes.
I can’t wait to be able to blog about the final product.
Within the past few weeks I have received two sales calls from vendors. This in itself isn’t too unusual because when I attend industry conferences I often sign up to get additional information. I never indicate that I have BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, or Timing) so my requests always go to the bottom of the follow-up list. Thankfully, I am rarely called by a sales person so I don’t have to explain that I am in product management and will never purchase one of their products. Read more…
The March 2, 2009 issue of Fortune magazine got me thinking about the various types of cloud computing. Prior to reading it, I thought of the Cloud much as VMware describes it; an on-demand computing resource that can be transparently used when needed. However, Forture defined the Cloud as “centralized computing services that are delivered over the internet.” I have always thought of this model as Software as a Service (SaaS), and I am not sure I agree with the “centralized” part. Fortune mentioned salesforce.com as an example of a company leveraging cloud computing. Another article in the same issue described how Kenworth trucks “took advantage of cloud computing” because they rented time on a supercomputer thousands of mile away. Finally, a sidebar article implied that cloud computing is “applications housed remotely and delivered via the net.
When I first read the articles I thought, “Fortune doesn’t get it. That isn’t cloud computing.” Upon further reflection I wondered if maybe my definition is too restrictive. Maybe cloud computing is a category that includes multiple types of computing, including SaaS. I wonder if it is time for someone to define a cloud computing taxonomy.
I have done some posts on using PowerShell actions in vWire and have generally shared scripts that give basic functionality to do things like start and stop a virtual machine and other scripts to help gather more information like returning the contents of a log file, for example. Today’s script that I would like to share is designed to address and resolve the Port Group Network Security Policy Alert. This alert is enabled by default in vWire and this alert informs you if a port group does not have a fully hardened Network Security Policy. If one of the following options is enabled it will trigger this alert: promiscuous mode, forged transmits, or MAC address changes.
This script has been posted on the vWire contributed content area of the website and you can download the script here to import into your vWire environment. Below you will also find the code used in the script:
Make sure to take note of the use of the $input variable above to help you in writing your own scripts. This is the piped information from the vWire server. This script is written as a host script so the host name is what is piped in from vWire and I am using two foreach loops to get all the VMware ESX hosts and all the vSwitch names.
Today’s topic is working with PowerShell in vWire to enter and exit Maintenance Mode. If you do not have vWire installed yet you can download it here. Once you have vWire installed you will notice that there is a script action to exit Maintenance Mode. When writing scripts for entering and exiting Maintenance Mode, exiting is by far the easiest to do. Let’s take a look at the code to Exit Maintenance Mode.
The first step is to loop through the piped $input to get the name of each of the VMware ESX hosts that you want to exit Maintenance Mode. Once we have the name then we set the state of the host to Connected which will cause the host to exit Maintenance Mode.
Let’s take a quick look at all the options the -State switch will offer us:
If the State parameter is specified as Connected, then:
- if the host is currently connected and not in maintenance mode, does nothing.
- if the host is in maintenance mode, exits the maintenance mode.
- if the host is not connected or not responding, tries to reconnect.
If the State parameter is specified as Disconnected, then:
- if the host is currently connected, attempts to disconnect.
- if the host is not connected or not responding, does nothing.
If State is specified as Maintenance, then:
- if the host is currently connected and not in maintenance mode, enters maintenance mode.
- if the host is currently connected and in maintenance mode, does nothing.
- if the host is not connected or not responding, attempts to reconnect and enter maintenance mode.
If you notice, vWire does not ship with an action to Enter Maintenance Mode. I built a quick down and dirty script or action to perform this task. You can download this action here from the community content section to be able to import into your vWire installation. Entering Maintenance mode actually requires a few more steps to work properly. Let’s look at the code and see what is involved.
Notice that the first step is to get a list of all the VMware ESX hosts in the cluster. From there we will loop through the piped $input looking for each VMware ESX Server. Now, before we can enter Maintenance Mode, we will need to vMotion all the running virtual machines from the host we are performing the action on. In the code $vSRV is the name of the VMware ESX host that we are working to put into Maintenance Mode and we want to make sure we use all the other VMware ESX servers in the cluster to migrate the virtual machines to. The -cnotmatch switch will do just that to make sure the ESX hosts we got from the Get-VMHost command is not the name of the host we are working on
Now the script can migrate all the running virtual machines to all the other hosts in the cluster and then will enter Maintenance Mode successfully.
Since we launched vWire at the beginning of the month I have been asked a few times how to help people get their PowerShell scripts to work with vWire. This post is going to answer that question and give examples that you will need to make this happen. The first thing that you need to know is that vWire works by pipelining the information to PowerShell. PowerShell will accept this input in the form of the variable $input. Let me give you a quick example that should help make better sense of this. Let’s look at the code to start virtual machines.
Foreach ($vm in (get-vm))
{
Start-VM -VM $vm -confirm:$false
}
In this example I use a foreach loop to get all the names of the virtual machines that the command “get-vm” returns and puts it in the $vm variable. Each different virtual machine name is looped through the Start-VM command until all virtual machines have been started. The -confirm:$false switch is so that we do not get prompted to confirm we want to perform this action or start the virtual machines.
Now let’s look at the same code that would work in vWire
Notice that the object type is set to “Virtual Machine.” This lets vWire know what object this action or script will be used against. If you wrote an action for the hosts then the object type would be Hosts. You have the choice to select:
1.DataCenter
2.Cluster
3.Host
4.VM
5. Snapshots
6. Resource Pool
7. Cluster Objects (i.e. affinity rules)
8. Device Objects (i.e. vCDROM, vNic ect)
9. Management Objects (i.e. VC Folders ect)
10. Storage Objects (SCSI LUN)
11. VM Object (Current Snapshots)
This should give you enough information to get started and take a peek at the power you have with vWire. For more information on vWire you can check out the vWire Community and to also share content with others in the community.
Time to sharpen your skills with vWire because I have heard rumors there might be a contest coming up.
Tripwire's solutions for virtual and physical infrastructures provide comprehensive configuration management, improving availability, security, and compliance.
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