ESXi

vCenter Orchestrator: Operation Automate

First, I want to thank the vCOteam for their help and all the others on the VMTN forums that helped me learn more about vCO and what it can do.  Secondly, I want to thank Cody Bunch from ProfessionalVMware.com for inspiring me to write this, a little push from a tweet can go a long way.  Thanks again and now on to the fun stuff…

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HP and Emulex CIM Providers on ESXi 5

It looks like HP and Emulex have finally worked out their differences with their CIM providers.  As some of you will remember, you were unable to install Emulex CIM Providers after or with the HP Offline Bundle installed.  This was something that plagued admins for a while because it was often hit or miss whether you could use them at the same time or not.  I know from my experience I have not been able to have them both loaded until HP and Emulex released their latest CIM Provider bundles.

I installed the following bundles via the vMA and in the following order:

  1. hp-esxi5.0uX-bundle-1.1-37.zip – Available in HP’s Software Depot (Link)
  2. vmw-esx-5.0.0-emulex-3.4.15.5-01-offline_bundle-486461.zip – Available on Emulex’s Support Site (Link)

For those of you who are would like to install these as I did on some standalone hosts, you can follow these steps:

  1. Upload the above bundles to your hosts’ datastore.
  2. Login to your vMA.
  3. Set your target:  vifptarget -s esxi01.vsential.net
  4. Put host into maintenance mode:  vicfg-hostops –operation enter
  5. Run:  esxcli software vib install -d “[DatastoreName]vmw-esx-5.0.0-emulex-3.4.15.5-01-offline_bundle-486461.zip“ (This will require a reboot!)
  6. Reboot host.  (Command: vicfg-hostops –operation reboot)
  7. When host comes back online, run:  esxcli software vib install -d “[DatastoreName]hp-esxi5.0uX-bundle-1.1-37.zip“ (This will require a reboot!)
  8. Reboot host.  (Command: vicfg-hostops –operation reboot)
  9. When host comes back online, run:  vicfg-hostops –operation exit
  10. Finished!

Your host should now have the Emulex and HP CIM Providers installed and useable.  Let me know if this works for you and sound off in the comments.  Enjoy!

Enabling SNMP on ESXi 5

Some people have asked how to enable SNMP on ESXi 5.  The process is identical to how you would on ESXi 4.x.  Here’s how:

  1. Connect to your vMA instance through Putty, SecureCRT or whatever app you use.
  2. Add the server:  vifp addserver vs-esxi.vsential.com (This is only needed if you haven’t already added the target!)
  3. Set your target:  vifptarget -s vs-esxi.vsential.com
  4. Configure SNMP Community:  vicfg-snmp –communities vscomname
  5. Configure SNMP Trap Host:  vicfg-snmp –targets TrapHostIP@161/vscomname
  6. Enable SNMP on the ESXi host:  vicfg-snmp –enable

You can show the configuration by typing:  vicfg-snmp –show

That’s it…now you can snmpwalk the host from the Trap host you configured earlier by typing:  snmpwalk -v2c -cvscomname vs-esxi.vsential.com

You can check out VMware KB Article 1008065 for information on how to configure this as well which uses VMware vSphere RCLI instead of the vMA.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions then please sound off in the comments!

ESXi 5.0 and Remote syslog

So I have started laying out the beginnings of the new vSphere 5 infrastructure at my work.  Got a couple of hosts laid out, vCenter built up, and dotting my i’s.  The particular piece I was working on just a few moments ago was remote syslog for the ESXi hosts.

We all know that with the release of vMA 5 that vi-logger was removed from the distribution…why I am not sure…but it was.  This doesn’t mean that you can’t still use the vMA for logging.  In comes good ol’ syslog-ng which is standard in the distribution.  The configuration was done with some tips from VirtuallyGhetto so I won’t go into the details of that portion as to not recreate the wheel.

Onwards!!!

In order to configure an ESXi host for remote logging we can do this from either the GUI or from the vMA using esxcli when connected to each host.  In the GUI, you will find the settings in Host Configuration->Advanced Settings->Syslog.  The information that is immediately pertinent is the Syslog.global.logHost.  When adding something to this field you need to follow the following format: protocol://RemoteSyslogServer:port.

When configuring this from the vMA using esxcli, just connect to your target and run:

esxcli system syslog config set –loghost=protocol://RemoteSyslogServer:port

This will configure the target host with your remote syslog server information.  In immediate thought you would think this would get it to start working…nope…we aren’t done yet.  After you configure the remote syslog server information you will need to open the outbound ports on your ESXi hosts’ firewalls.  This can be done through Host Configuration->Security Profile->Firewall Properties.  Just enable the syslog outbound connections and this portion is all set.  Finished…NOPE!  PSYCH!

Another step that is required before logging actually starts to work is to reload the syslog service on your target hosts.  You can do this from the vMA by connecting to your target hosts and running:  esxcli system syslog reload

Finally, you can sit back and relax while your hosts start to log to your vMA host.  Enjoy!

Here are some references you can look to for guidance:

If you have any questions or comments then please feel free to sound off in the comments!

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