VMWare - THE AUDITORS ARE COMING!

Hi All,

The Auditors are coming!

Here are 2 handy scripts for you to run against your VMWare database. Written for Oracle, but will probably work for MSSQL too.

This one, returns the OS type and name of a virtual machine, and the host it runs on:

select v.DNS_name, h.dns_name, v.guest_os

from vpx_vm v

inner join VPX_HOST h on h.id = v.host_id

where v.DNS_NAME is not null

order by h.dns_name;

 This one returns build version, name, boot-time and some blank and prefilled columns (because of the spreadsheet we had to use) You will need to replace [VCNAME] with your Virtual Center name. Funny that

select l.product_name, l.edition_name, l.product_version, '', h.boot_time, h.name, '[VCNAME]', '', '', 'Production', 'Location', '', '', '', '', h.cpu_core_count / h.cpu_count, h.cpu_count, h.product_name from vpx_lic_assets a
inner join vpx_lic_context c on a.asset_id = c.asset_id
inner join vpx_lic_licenses l on c.license_id = l.license_id

inner join vpxv_hosts h on a.name = h.dns_name;

This should help with the most basic questions. Other people want more, or less info.
Some useful tables/views:

Tables:
vpx_lic_licenses
vpx_lic_assets
vpx_lic_context
vpx_vm
vpx_host 


Views:
vpxv_hosts



Thanks for reading,

Install and configuration of SRM 4.1

Hi All,

Configuration of SRM:

For the initial config of SRM, I installed it onto the same server as the Virtual Center. I am only supporting 25 VMs at these early stages. I won't cover the installation procedure here as its a piece of cake, what I will say is that you need to set up your database, login and you will also need to go into ODBC and set up your database connection before running setup.

Once this has been done, log into your virtual center server through the client.

Click on plugins, then install the vCenter Site recovery manager extension.

I'm going to take you into the GUI for this so you can see what needs configuring.

Once it has installed, you will have another tree under "Solutions and Applications"
Go into Site recovery.

• You need to provide a login for the local (primary) site and the paired site (DR)
• You also need to create a connection between the 2 sites
• You need to provide a driver and login details for your Storage device.
• Inventory mappings are source folders/datacenters and destination datacenters/resource groups
• Protection Groups are bunches of machines carved up into lumps. The lumps depend on various things like OLAs, applications, server teams and other logical groups

First things first then.

Create a new user on the SRM (live site) server.
I did this simply by creating a local user on the VC server. If you have a seperate SRM server, you'll need to create a domain account. It will need full admin priviledges on VMware though.

Create a new user on the SRM (DR/Failover) server. Same as above.

Go into the site recovery manager, click on "Site Recovery" on the tree view on the left hand side.
In the main pane, under "Protection Setup", click configure.

Follow the prompts. All you are doing is putting the user accounts in that you set up above.
Once that is done, you should notice that the local site and paired site boxes are populated. If they aren't, something has gone wrong.

Next step:

Array managers. Storage, basically.

1. Set up your LUNs and your snapmirrors/data protection transfers/remote clones, whatever your storage vendor wants to call it this week. This needs to be done first as when we get to the next bit it scans your storage to get this information. If you don't do this bit first, you'll have to run the same scan again and depending on the number of luns, you could be sat there for quite some time.
2. You will need to provide a user account for both the live and DR sides of your storage arrays. It will need to ability to snapclone a replicated lun (for testing) and to break a mirrored volume, delete a volume etc... pretty low level stuff.
3. Pop onto the vmware website and search for your storage vendors driver for SRM. Download the right ones for you (either block or CIFS or both) and copy it to your SRM server. They should come as MSI packages, or self-installing executables so run them.

Once they are installed restart the SRM services.

Back to the Vsphere client.

Click the configure button next to array managers
Click Add

fill in the IP address details and the username and password for your primary storage.
It will refresh and you should see the array ID and the device count. (device count is the number of luns or presented storage from that device.)

Add all your storage arrays like that, then hit next.

Same again, this time adding your secondary (DR) sites storage username and password

press next and this should show you a list of all replicated data stores. If you have replication switched on, you should get a list of datastores. Hit Finish.


Nearly there!

Inventory Mappings - hit configure.

Here is where you map you current live directories/networks/clusters etc... to the DR site resources. Easy enough done if you map things the same either side.

Protection Groups.
First thing you need to do, is to go onto your DR storage and present a small LUN where you can put your placeholder data files for all your protected machines. Then go back to the VClient

Click Create to create a protection group
This is volume based VM protection groups, so choose your volume
Choose where to put your placeholder data files (you're new lun would be great)
then click finish.

You're done. Now its time to create a basic plan. Plans are always created on the secondary or DR side.

• Point your VClient at your secondary VC and login.(oh quick stop here....look at all those machines!!! Don't turn them on, they are placeholders)
• Click solutions and Applications -> Site Recovery
• Click recovery plans. (we'll just do a very, very basic one. Although if your secondary and primary sites match exactly, this plan would be amazing for you)
• Click create
• Give it a name click next.
• Choose a Protection Group
• Click next - Leave the timeouts as default as we won't be doing either.

Test networks. Right, if you run the test plan, then SRM will either create "fake" vswitches, or you can make it do the "real" networking. Map the networks to the correct type here. Auto means create a non-uplinked test switch.

Suspend local VMs - if your secondary site hosts test or development machines, they rank below production machines that are going through DR process. You can configure SRM to suspend these machines, releasing those resources.

Click finish.

Want to test it?

Choose a recovery plan in the tree view on the left.
Under the summary tab you can see some buttons.
Click Test.

There you go, all done.
If you want to see what its doing, log into another client session.
On your original session drive SRM from the recovery steps tab.
Click it and click the test button (top left)
Now you can see what steps its got to. On your second session you can see what the machines are doing.

There you have it.

Basic failover in SRM.


Thanks for reading