News

Backup Comparison Updated with lastet Versions

Many things were announced at or before VMworld, Backup Tools were no different. Each major vendor has new versions of their software and this update to the backup guide looks at these new versions. Specifically version 2.0 from Veeam, 3.1.18 from PHD, and 3.4.2 from VizionCore.

Look for more updates to this guide as new tools and versions of the products are released.

Visit: http://vmprofessional.com/index.php?content=esx3backups

Posted by Texiwill at Wednesday, September 24, 2008.

snapalert.pl updated for ESX 3.5.0 Update 2 RCLI

A couple of readers wrote in to tell me that the new RCLI ( from Update 2 ) was incompatible with snapalert.pl. I had actually already changed how it worked ( it now scans an entire VirtualCenter vs a single Datacenter ) and the new version worked without any modifications in the new RCLI. The new version is available in the same place as the old one.

Enjoy.

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Saturday, September 13, 2008.

VMProfessional releases: vmpimlscan.pl

One of the downsides of moving from VMware ESX "Classic" to the svelte VMware ESXi Installable/Embedded is the loss of functionality of the service console, and the abiltiy to install 3rd party agents. When looking at the problem in depth, the only 3rd party software that was essential to how I worked on a day to day basis was the HP SIM agents which provided some hardware alerting that was hard to reproduce without them. To work around this problem, I developed a lightweight perl script (vmpimlscan.pl) to alleviate the burden of this loss. In a nutshell, vmpimlscan.pl has the ability to gather all of the host information from VirtualCenter, and then talk to the ilo interfaces of those hosts and read the IML ( Integrated Management Log ) and parse the output looking for hardware failures. The script can then send the alerts through email ( or an external program like openview ) to a ticketing system for automatic alerts and possibly automatically generated tickets. The script will also be a part of Amir Sharif's VMWorld 2008 session PO1520: Managing VMware ESXi in the Datacenter. I've now published the script so that it is available for download.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to make the VMworld 2008 session due to a scheduling conflict, but I will be around VMworld 2008, so if you have questions about it and will be in Vegas next week drop me a line.

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Saturday, September 13, 2008.