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Nested Virtualization Resources

10/04/2012 by William Lam 7 Comments

Here is a consolidated page on all the articles that I have written about the Nested Virtualizatoin (nested ESXi, Hyper-V, etc) and all the goodies that are "Not Supported".

vSphere / vCloud 5.1

  • Having Difficulties Enabling Nested ESXi in vSphere 5.1?
  • How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vSphere 5.1
  • How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vCloud Director 5.1

vSphere / vCloud 5.0

  • How to Enable Support for Nested 64bit & Hyper-V VMs in vSphere 5
  • The Missing Piece In Creating Your Own Ghetto vSEL Cloud

Additional Info/Tips/Tricks/

  • Nested ESXi 5.1 Supports VMXNET3 Network Adapter Type
  • How to Configure Nested ESXi 5 to Support EVC Clusters
  • How to Enable Nested vFT (virtual Fault Tolerance) in vSphere 5
  • How to Install VMware VSA in Nested ESXi 5 Host Using the GUI
  • Cool Undocumented Features in vCloud Director 1.5
  • The Missing Piece In Creating Your Own Ghetto vSEL Cloud
  • Nested Virtualization APIs For vSphere & vCloud Director 5.1
  • How To Enable Nested ESXi Using VXLAN In vSphere & vCloud Director 
  • Will Intel’s VMCS Shadowing Feature Benefit VMware’s Nested Virtualization?
  • How to run Nested RHEV Hypervisor on ESXi? 
  • How to quickly setup and test VMware VSAN (Virtual SAN) using Nested ESXi
  • How to run Nested ESXi on top of a VSAN datastore? 
  • VMware Tools for Nested ESXi 
  • Why is Promiscuous Mode & Forged Transmits required for Nested ESXi?
  • How to properly clone a Nested ESXi VM?
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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: amd-v, ept, esxi, esxi 5, esxi4, esxi4.1, esxi5.1, hyper-v, intel vt, nested, rvi, vhv, virtual hardware virtualization, vSphere, vSphere 4, vSphere 5, vSphere 5.1

Extracting SSL Thumbprint from ESXi

04/15/2012 by William Lam 12 Comments

While browsing the VMTN forums earlier this week, I noticed an interesting request from a user who was trying to compile an inventory of the SHA1 Thumbprints for all his ESXi hosts. The challenge the user had, was that he was capturing this information manually by "looking" at the DCUI screen which is where the SHA1 Thumbprint for an ESXi host is displayed by default.

As you might have guessed, this can be very tedious and error prone by copying down this very long string by just looking at the screen. Even if you do not make a mistake copying this long string, I bet your eyes will eventually give out. Luckily, there are a few ways to retrieve this information and I will show you some methods to help automate this across all of your ESXi hosts.

UPDATE (05/22/16) - Here's how you can extract SSL Thumbprint using PowerShell

Option 1 - Retrieve SSL Thumbprint using the DCUI as shown above, this is going to be the most manual method.

Option 2 - If you have remote SSH or direct console access to ESXi Shell, you can login to your ESXi host and using openssl utility, you can retrieve the SSL Thumbprint which you can then use or copy off to a remote host.

openssl x509 -in /etc/vmware/ssl/rui.crt -fingerprint -sha1 -noout

Option 3 - You can remotely retrieve the SSL Thumbprint by leveraging just the openssl utility and you do not even need to login to the ESXi host. This not only allows you to retrieve the SSL Thumbprint from a centralized location, but you can easily automate this across all your hosts.

echo -n | openssl s_client -connect 172.30.0.252:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -fingerprint -sha1

Using Option 3, you can easily wrap this in a simple "for" loop to iterate through all your ESXi hosts as long as you have either the hostname/IP Address. Here is a simple shell script that you can use to iterate through all your ESXi hosts to extract the SSL Thumbprint.

In the script above, I have a list of three ESXi hosts and it is simply going through each host and executing the two commands to extract the SSL Thumbprint and displaying it on the screen.

Option 4 - You can also retrieve the SSL Thumbprint using the vSphere API, but the property is only displayed when it is connected to a vCenter Server. There is a property on the ESXi host called sslThumbprint that is populated when querying against the vCenter Server that is managing the ESXi host. You can use the vSphere Health Check script which captures this and other useful information about your vSphere infrastructure.

As you can see, there are several options on obtaining the SSL Thumbprint for an ESXi host, you definitely do not have to manually read it off the DCUI screen. Automation FTW again! 🙂

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Filed Under: Automation, ESXi Tagged With: esxi 5, esxi4, PowerCLI, powershell, sha1, ssl certificate, thumbprint

Datastore File Management using vCLI vifs

03/09/2012 by William Lam Leave a Comment

There are many useful scripts that are bundled with the VMware vCLI, one such script, that is not very well known is the vifs utility which provides datastore file management. When you right click on a datastore and browse using the vSphere Client, you can create a new folder, download/upload, delete and move files.

Using the vCLI's vifs utility, you can perform the same set of operations via the command-line and behind the scenes it uses the vSphere API fileManager to perform these operations. You can also browse datastore by just having access to a web browser, just point it to the following address: https://[ESXI_HOSTNAME]/folder and you can access the datastores by clicking through the links.

To browse the datastore using vifs, you will need vCLI installed on either a Windows/Linux system or you may use VMware vMA.

To browse a specific datastore for an ESXi host, you will need to first list the available datastores by using the following command: vifs --server [SERVER] --username [USERNAME] --listds

Once you have identified the datastore you are interested in, you will then use the --dir flag to list the contents of the directory and their sub-directories by using the following command: vifs --server [SERVER] --username [USERNAME] --dir '[DATASTORENAME]'

Note: The format of the datastore name must be in brackets '[datastorename]' which is how a datastore path is identified in the vSphere API. To list sub-directories, you will need a space between the datastore name and the directory name and do not forget to quote the parameter

Let's say you would like to download the .vmx configuration file for in the directory, you can use --get flag to by using the following command:

vifs --server [SERVER] --username [USERNAME] --get '[DATASTORENAME] somedir/somefile.vmx'

Note: In the example above, we are downloading the file in the current working directory denoted by the "." (period). If you wish to download it somewhere else or even renaming the file, you will need to specify the full path to the destination


If you wanted to automate the downloading of say all .vmx configuration files, it might be pretty tedious to run through the directory discovery, so here is a quick shell script called getVMVMX.sh that is more user friendly that allows you to easily download all .vmx configurations for a given datastore.

To use the script, you will need vCLI installed on either a Linux system or use VMware vMA and be sure to set the executable permission on the shell script. You will need to specify the credentials to the ESX(i) host and the specific datastore you wish to either "list" or "download" all .vmx configuration files.

Using the --listds flag, you will need to identify the datastore you wish to use. Next you will use the following command to "list" all .vmx configuration file: ./getVMVMX.sh [ESXI_SERVER] [USERNAME] "[PASSWORD]" [DATASTORE] list

To download all .vmx configuration file you will use the following command:

./getVMVMX.sh [ESXI_SERVER] [USERNAME] "[PASSWORD]" [DATASTORE] download [FOLDER]

where FOLDER is a directory that will automatically be created for you to store all .vmx configuration files

Note: You can easily modify the script to add an additional "for loop" at the beginning to automatically download .vmx configurations for all datastores. I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

So if you ever need to grab a vmware.log file for a specific VM or upload an ISO to datastore, you can do so from the command-line using the vifs utility that is bundled with the vCLI.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: esxi 5, esxi4, esxi4.1, esxi5, vcli, vSphere

ghettoVCB + ghettoVCB-restore Updates

11/28/2011 by William Lam 6 Comments

I finally got a chance to finish up the documentation on some of the new feature enhancements and bug fixes for both ghettoVCB and ghettoVCB-restore this weekend. One of the biggest change is both ghettoVCB and ghettoVCB-restore are now bundled together and ghettoVCB-restore is now being version controlled on github just like ghettoVCB. This has been on the backlog for awhile and I am sorry it took this long to get implemented.

Here are the release notes for the enhancement/fixes for both ghettoVCB + ghettoVCB-restore. Hope you enjoy these updates and if you have any issues, please report them on the ghettoVCB VMTN group.

ghettoVCB 

Enhancements:

  • ghettoVCB & ghettoVCB-restore is now packaged together and both scripts are versioned on github
  • ESXi 5 firewall check for email port (Check FAQ #33 for more details)
  • New EMAIL_DELAY_INTERVAL netcat variable to control slow SMTP servers
  • ADAPTER_TYPE (buslogic,lsilogic,ide) no longer need to manually specified, script will auto-detect based on VMDK descriptor file
  • Using symlink -f parameter for quicker unlink/re-link for RSYNC use case
  • Updated documentation, including NFS issues (Check FAQ #19 for more details including new VMware KB 1035332 article)

Fixes:

  • vSphere 4.1 Update 2 introduced new vim-cmd snapshot.remove param, this has now been updated in script to detect this new param change
ghettoVCB-restore

Enhancements:

  • Support for ESX(i) 5.0
  • Combined ghettoVCB + ghettoVCB-restore scripts
  • ghettoVCB-restore is now versioned on github
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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: esxi4, esxi4.1, esxi5, ghettoVCB, ghettovcb-restore

How to Add a Splash of Remote Color to ESXi Shell

07/23/2011 by William Lam 6 Comments

This morning I noticed a very interesting retweet by fellow vExpert Wil van Antwerpen from another vExpert: Richard Cardona (You may know him as rcardona2k on the VMTN Community Forums) about a neat little trick with the use of remote ESXi Shell (previous known as remote TSM).

For those of you who login remotely via SSH to the ESXi Shell (previously known as unsupported mode and Tech Support Mode) know that you can run the DCUI utility remotely by just typing "dcui". The remote DCUI works just like it does using the direct console, with the exception of displaying the famous yellow and black screen that we are familiar with.

Richard came upon a neat little trick by setting the terminal type to "linux" from the default "xterm" that the yellow and black can be enabled when using the remote DCUI.

Before launching DCUI utility, you will need to run the following command on the ESXi Shell:

export TERM=linux

Next you will just type "dcui" and hit enter

Here is an example of running remote DCUI in color on ESXi 5

Here is an example of running remote DCUI in color on ESXi 4.1

Note: As you can see this is not a new trick in vSphere 5, but has been there since 4.x days but one big change with vSphere 5 is the full resolution of DCUI which many have complained about in the past.

If you are interested in other ways of customizing the DCUI, take a look at this blog post How to add a splash of color to ESXi DCUI Welcome Screen

Don't forget to play some cool soundtrack music when using the DCUI 😉

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Filed Under: ESXi, Not Supported Tagged With: dcui, esxi4, esxi5, vSphere 4, vSphere 5

How to add a splash of color to ESXi DCUI Welcome Screen

09/09/2010 by William Lam 24 Comments

Earlier this year I created a simple vSphere SDK for Perl script that allows you to update ESXi's DCUI (Direct Console User Interface) banner with multiple lines of text. I originally thought you could not customize the text color or the background color, though recently I found out that was not the case. While doing some testing on ESXi 4.1, I noticed two files (support,welcome) located under /etc/vmware and looking at the contents of support, it made realize we might be able to change the colors.

Here is the contents of /etc/vmware/support, notice the special formatting of the variables including color tags:

I decided to use one of my favorite UNIX utility, "strings" to take at the dcui binary that is located under /sbin in the Busybox Console (Tech Support Mode) and discovered you can control both the font color and background color. There are also special variables that can be used to display information about the ESXi host such as the product version or IP Address.

Here are the supported colors:

white
black
dark-grey
light-grey
yellow

Here are the special variables:

assettag
BIOSversion
BMCversion
CIM_Chassis
CPLDversion
esxproduct
esxversion
hostname
ip
license
memory
OMC_MCFirmwareIdentity
OMC_SMASHFirmwareIdentity
OtherIdentifyingInfo
PLSAversion
serial-number
servicetag
ssl-thumbprint
supportperiod
supportstart
VersionString
VMware_HHRCSoftwareIdentity

There are two ways of updating the DCUI welcome banner: using local or remote esxcfg-advcfg or manually editing /etc/vmware/welcome file.

Here is an example of using vCLI's esxcfg-advcfg:

Here is what that looks like on the DCUI:

As you can see, this is not easy if you want to update multiple lines. You would need to add a lot more spaces to force newlines, but this becomes tedious and pretty much unreadable. The second method is edit the welcome file that is located in the Busybox Console, which requires you to enable ESXi's Tech Support Mode. I wrote a quick Perl script called generateDCUIScreen.pl which accepts an input file and allows a user to customize the output and the script generates the "welcome" file which is uploaded to your ESXi host.

Here is an example of the input file:

The script will parse the input file which will contain definitions for:

  • bgcolor and color as described above
  • special variables as described above (must use braces for variables to be translated)
  • custom text
  • "=space=" string which is unique to my script which generates the newlines

The script requires that you have Perl, but you do not need to have vSphere SDK for Perl. For ease of use, I executed the script using vMA.

Here is an example execution using the input file from above:


You will need to scp the new"welcome" file to your ESXi host under /etc/vmware which is empty by default. For the changes to take effect, you will need to run the following command at the console:

kill $(ps | grep dcui | awk '{print $1}')

This will kill dcui utility and watchdog process will spawn a new instance causing the change to take effect Note: A reboot will also do the job, but be sure to run /sbin/auto-backup.sh before doing so, that way the change will be backed up.

Here is what DCUI screen looks like:

As you can see, you can control variety of pre-defined variables including hostname and IP Address and custom text for your organization. This is useful for those that do not want to expose all the information that available on the default DCUI screen, which may be a security concern for some organizations. A few things to note, I was not able to fill the entire screen like the default DCUI banner and the "welcome" file is character sensitive and you need to use tabs or white spaces to force the background to get filled. There is also a limit in the number of characters per row before it wraps to the next line.

I am sure there is someone out there that will create some interesting ASCII art, but here is my 5min free hand attempt at it 😉

This can easily be integrated into a scripted install using the new ESXi 4.1 kickstart feature.

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Filed Under: ESXi, Not Supported Tagged With: dcui, esxi4, vSphere 4.1

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Services Business Unit (CSBU) at VMware. He focuses on Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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