Alfa BBT

On a Virtual Center 4 update 1 installation I noticed an Perf Charts service error on the performance overview tab. The advanced performance tab is functioning as normal.

There are 3 VMware KBs related to this type of error:

• KB1009872
• KB1010172
• KB1013877

Unfortunately none of these solved my problem.

In virtual center U1 the configuration of the performance charts database has changed location. It’s now located in C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\conf\Catalina\localhost\statsreport.xml.

VMware updated the KB article (KB1013877) in the mean time to reflect the changes in Update 1.

I needed to add a group of users to the ACL of all our printers. As we currently have about 100 printers; I looked if I could use powershell for this.
Currently on Windows server 2008 there are no built in cmdlets to administrate printers. But I did find a useful powershell script with everything I needed.

I ended up with only executing one line of code to add the group to all the printers.

Get-printer printserver | add-printerpermission -user “domain\groupname” -AceType Allow -accessmask ManagePrinters

The script can be found here, I’m posting the google translation link as my Russian isn’t that good;-)

I just came across a post by Jonathan Medd over at simple-talk.com about the new Active Directory recycle bin in Windows Server 2008 R2.

It’s definitely worth the read.

On our teminal server 2008 farm we had some serious problems the last couple of days. Whenever users tried to login they got a “Access Denied” error. Only administrator accounts were able to log in. Additionally the eventlog, the McAfee services and some other services weren’t started automatically.
It was even not possible to start the eventlog manually.

We saw this issue on all our Terminal servers once they were joined to the domain. We finally nailed down the cause of these problems to be an group policy who configures the language settings.

Apparently this GPO changed also the language settings for the local system account. Which caused these services not to start anymore.

Pieter Wigleven posted already about a similar problem he had with Hyper-V and how he fixed it.

Update: Microsoft released a hotfix for this problem: KB951430.

One of my colleagues gave me a list of AD groups for the sharepoint environment he’s confguring. Instead of creating them manually I used the Quest ActiveRoles management shell.

import-csv ‘SecurityGroups.csv’ | foreach {
New-QADGroup -Parent $_.ParentContainer -Name $_.Name -sAM $_.Name -GroupScope $_.GroupScope -GroupType $_.GroupType
}

This script imports a .csv file to create the security groups. The .csv file contains the OU distinguished name, the group Name, the group type (security or distribution) and finally the scope (Domain Local, Global or Universal).

It looks like this:

Parentcontainer,Name,Grouptype,GroupScope
“OU=Sharepoint,DC=domain,DC=local”,SecurityGroup01,Security,DomainLocal

Carter Shanklin announced the winners of the contest.

1st prize: The guest provisioning system of LucD. This application lets you provision your VMs in an easy way. You can set the options from one screen no clicking around to configure everything manually.

2nd prize: VI Power Documenter by tzamora. This script generates reports about your virtual infrastructure.

3rd prize: PowerVDI script by Dan Baskette. It let you deploy multiple VDI instances on an EMC celera using snapshots and AD integration.

I’m sure there are other contributions that are very useful.

Congrats to the winners. Nice job guys.

Last week Netapp released there first SMVI release. SMVI integrates VMware snapshots and Netapp snapshots to take consistent backups. To do this SMVI takes VMware snapshots before taking a snapshot of the volume on the Netapp.

Now you can backup your complete VMware infrastructure in seconds without putting any load on your storage or ESX servers. No need to have any additional hardware, your existing VMware and Storage infrastructure is sufficient. SMVI supports all types of storage connectivity, FC, iSCSI and NFS are all supported. It’s much easier then using VCB and much quicker as well

Kostadis Roussos is writing a series of blog posts about the technical background of SMVI. Check out his blog.

I’m not going in to detail about the installation of SMVI as it isn’t rocket science.

The SMVI client login screen to connect to the SMVI server. There is also a CLI to administer your SMVI server.

The getting started screen, with all steps to do in order to configure snapmanager.

The Setup screen. First you have to add the Virtualcenter server of your VMware environment. At the moment you can only configure one VC server in SMVI. Hopefully this will change in future releases, especially in conjunction with Site Recovery Manager this would be usefully.

Secondly you have to add your storage systems. If there are snapmirror relations for your VMFS/NFS datastores configured you need to add the destination Netapp as well. Then you can initiate consistent snapmirror replication of your datastores.

Once finished configuring SMIV it’s time to add some backup jobs.

Give the backup job a name and description.

Select the datastores which you want to backup. You can also tick the checkbox to “Initiate snapmirror update” then you replicate the consistent snapshot to your remote netapp.

Configure the backup schedule.

Add the user which will be used to do the backup. This user needs access to the VC server as it will need to create VMware snapshots on the VMs.

Configure the retention scheme of your backups.

The email notification settings screen.

The backup job configuration is finished.x

The backup schedule overview screen with our previously configured job.

The backup job finished successfully, now we can do a restore.

When I tried restoring a VM which I deleted using the VI client SMVI wasn’t able to restore it. After some more testing I found that SMVI needs the VM’s directory to restore the VM files. It should be possible to restore the VM without that the original directory is necessary.

It’s also not possible to restore a VM to another datastore then it’s original datastore through SMVI. You can bypass this by mounting the backup and then copying the VM manually. Another possibility is to restore it to the original location and the use storage VMotion or cold migration to move the VM to another location.

Once the directory is recreated manually SMVI is able to restore the backup. If the VM isn’t in VC inventory anymore you need to manually register the VM in the VC once it’s restored.

On the backup screen you can manually take backups off complete datastores or VMs. When backing up individual VMs SMVI takes a Netapp snapshot of the whole datastore but only the backup of this VM will be consistent trough a VMware snapshot.

Dmitri over at Dmitry’s PowerBlog just posted about the integration between PowerGui and the VI client. I had already installed the PowerGUI 1.5.1 version but hadn’t noticed the plugin for the VI Client.

This makes managing your VMware environment using  Powershell even more easier. PowerGUI lets you write your own Powershell scripts and the VMware PowerPack is also compatible with the VI client plugin. The plugin uses your current connection to the VC. You don’t need to make a separate connection for every script.

I regularly need to administer EMC Clariion SANs for which Java JRE 1.4 is needed. Unfortunately some other websites/applications need a more recent Java version. Before I used a separate VM with an XP and Java 1.4 installed on it to administering clariions. This is some serious overkill and I was looking for a better solution. VMware released Thinapp 4.0, time to see if this is a better solution.

The Thinapp welcome screen.

Some info on how to use Thinapp. Make sure to always run it on a clean PC so you’re sure that you include all necessary files in your package. Under advanced settings you can select which drives you want to scan during the prescan.

Before installing the application Thinapp needs to scan your system to take a baseline snapshot.

The prescan is finished. Time to install and configure your application.

Once the application installation is finished, Thinapp does a postcan. It looks for differences on the file system as well as in the registry, all these changes become part of package.

Select the entry point you want to use.

Configure the security settings for the package and also the sandbox location. The user’s settings are configured in the sandbox.

Now it’s time to configure the isolation settings. Merged isolation lets you access the local user settings e.g. Firefox bookmarks. WriteCopy isolation all files are newly created and the application has no access to the local file system.

Select MSI generation when you want to distribute the package using any software distribution tool.

Thinapp copies all files and registry settings to the project location.

The final screen. Here we’re going to browse the project as we have to change some settings in the package.ini file.

As the Java JRE is packaged separately we have to edit the package.ini file and remove the ; from the OptionalAppLinks line.

We can now build the Firefox project.

Repeat the same steps for the Java JRE. Once that’s build create a “plugins” folder in the location of the Thinapped Firefox and copy the Java package to it. When Firefox is executed it will look for any exe file in the plugin folder and will link it.

No need to use a separate VM for administering Clariions anymore.

PS:  Marrs posted an excellent post on the VMware forum on packaging Firefox to run several versions of Java at the same time.

Last week VMware officially released the VI Toolkit for Windows.

• They replaced get-viserver with connect-viserver. get-viserver is now an alias for connect-viserver.
• disconnect-viserver was added which allows you to do a clean disconnect. Hence the rename of the get-viserver cmdlet.
• VMware also added cmdlets for managing the VMware Update Manager.