Deploy appliances via PowerCLI

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Script

Needed to deploy some appliances. I could have done that via a client, but it some what cumbersome and requires you to sit a wait for every step. Why not deploy appliances via Powercli? It’s easy, fast and requires only a few lines of commands. The PowerCli cmdlet is called “Import-VApp”. The cmdlet lets you specify fields like Source, Name and OvfConfiguration. The tricky part here is to know which OvfConfiguration parameters are needed. An OVA file is just a zip file with the vmdk and configuration files in it. It can simply be opened with a tool which supports […]

Log Insight API calls Appendix

Posted Michael Ryom4 CommentsPosted in Log Insight, Script

This is not a too lengthy blog post. It basically a copy/paste of routes file which is part of the Log Insight API. I have include both the 3.3 and 3.6 version, for comparisons. This is only meant as an educational blog post. It will give you an idea to what is possible with the Log Insight API, not just query wish, but also management wish. In order to make this work you have to follow the general guidelines for the Log Insight API and how to connect to it. As I haven’t done a Log Insight API blog post […]

New in vRops 6.3 – Cluster Management API

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in vRops

One of the new features in vRops 6.3 is the documentation and I assume support for the Cluster Management API aka Casa API. I have in the past documented some of these Cluster Management API calls. In blog posts such as, vRops undocumented API calls which is from vRops 6.2 or Exploring vRops Internal API going even further back. Luckily for us all, the vRops team have now added documentation to the Casa API, making it even easier for all to consume. First things first. How do you access it. Just like the regular API the documentation is contained within […]

esx.problem.net.vmknic.ip.duplicate – Hunting for MAC

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Log Insight, Script

Log Insight is a very powerful tool to monitor your environments health status. One of my favorite dashboards to is the “General – Problems” dashboard, which is part of the  “VMware – vSphere” content pack. It comes with Log Insight per default. Because there you can get a great overview of any problems that might be in your vSphere environment. One of the problems you might see is the “esx.problem.net.vmknic.ip.duplicate” or as it can be seen in the pie chart “net.vmknic.ip.duplicate”. This problem basically tells you there’s an misconfiguration in your environment. Two VMK nics have the same IP address […]

vRops undocumented API calls

Posted Michael Ryom1 CommentPosted in vRops

Over time I have had the please of using different API calls to vRops. To begin with a lot around the official vRops API, as can be seen here. Some of it was documented in the internal API some were not which can be seen here. In this blog post I explorer some more API calls. The calls here is of a different nature. Were as the prior was around doing precis calls to get a specific result. These call are of a more generic nature. These have to do with the vRops environment. These calls can be used to […]

Auto create Nano server for ESXi with Powershell

Posted Michael Ryom1 CommentPosted in Windows

I have recently played a little with Microsoft’s up coming Windows 2016 OS. One of the things I find very intriguing about Windows 2016 is Nano Server. It is the possibility to create a small and fast booting version of Windows. Nano server is JeOS (Just Enough OS), meaning that it all you need for the task ahead. Not more deploying 50GB+ servers with lots of features if you only need one. This equals faster boot times, smaller footprint on resources and smaller attack surface. All good things that IT has come to love from the Linux world. The only […]

Least user privilege for Management Pack for Storage Devices

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Log Insight, vRops

I recently installed Management Pack for Storage Devices at a customer site. The customer were required to use a service account which had limited privileges in vCenter. The account had the bare minimum needed for vRops to collect data from vCenter. Using the bare minimums for collecting data wasn’t sufficient for the Management Pack for Storage Devices. Found me self needing to find the least user privilege for Management Pack for Storage Devices. I looked at the documentation, but no answer there, so I then reached out to GSS which I later abandon as we were going no where fast. […]

Uninstalling vRops Management Pack

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in vRops

I recently had the pleasure of needing to uninstalling vRops Management Pack. Simply because the management pack wouldn’t start collecting after I upgraded the management pack. All you need is to ssh into a vRops node and execute three lines of commands. Cat the manifest.txt file of the management pack you need to uninstall and get the name Change directory to where the opscli tools are located Execute the opscli.sh script with a few paramenters Management Packs are located under /storage/db/pakRepoLocal/ as can be seen below by using “tab completion” (hit tab twice in a row). Now its just a […]

Custom vRops Content Pack for Log Insight

Posted Michael Ryom6 CommentsPosted in Log Insight, vRops

I work as a consultant. Mainly on vRops and Log Insight. This means that I have installed vRops and Log Insight quite a few times now. It also means that troubleshooting vRops is not that unfamiliar to me and what better tool to troubleshoot vRops with than VMware’s own Log Insight! In order to help me troubleshoot I have created a “content pack” for vRops. This content pack adds some more value, hence it’s not there in the current version of the vRops content pack. The content pack provides one dashboard with six widgets. The widgets are: vRops Webrequest respones […]

vRops Backup done right

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in vRops

vRops Backup Backing up vRealize Operations Manager or vRops isn’t as straight forward as one could wish for – There are some general things that need to be done right, but more important is some of the vRops specific quirks that needs to be done right in order to have a working and valid backup, which should be the biggest concern with taking backups in the first place. No one likes an inconsistent backup. Before I start with the the actual guide lines for doing vRops backup, I’ll point you to a great PDF which describes how to do backup […]