Update: Tips and Tricks with vMA 5.0
Check out the Getting started with vMA guide!
Here are some interesting scripts found on vMA:
The first tool is called bulkAddServers.pl which allows a user to specify a list of host(s) and providing a username/password once and the script will automatically import the entire list, without having to add each host manually and providing the credentials each time. [this works very if you have common account across all your host(s)].
The script is stored in: /opt/vmware/vima/samples/perl/bulkAddServers.pl
Sample file containing host(s) to add:
[[email protected] ~]$ cat hosts_to_add
everest.primp-industries.com
himalaya.primp-industries.com
Sample execution of adding two host(s):
[[email protected]afaeli ~]$ sudo /opt/vmware/vima/samples/perl/bulkAddServers.pl --filename hosts_to_add
Do you want to use the same password for all of the hosts (yes/no) : yes
Enter common root password:
All Targets Added Successfully.
Verify host(s) have been added:
[[email protected] ~]$ sudo vifp listservers
everest.primp-industries.com ESX
himalaya.primp-industries.com ESX
The next tool is primarly to help user's execute a command or series of command across a set of ESX(i) host(s), in the past you would need to manually do this for each of the manage host(s) with the vCLI/RCLI tools, say to add/update portgroup on a vSwitch for example. This can be pretty redudant and you could write a quck for loop to do this but VMware wrote a script called mcli which allows a user to execute a command and it's argument against a set of host(s) listed in a file.
The script is stored in: /opt/vmware/vima/samples/perl/mcli.pl
[[email protected] ~]$ /opt/vmware/vima/samples/perl/mcli.pl --help
Invalid arguments
Usage:
./mcli
Sample file containing host(s) to execute command against
[[email protected] ~]$ cat hosts_to_execute_cmd_on
everest.primp-industries.com
himalaya.primp-industries.com
Sample execution to check for syslog configuration
[[email protected] ~]$ /opt/vmware/vima/samples/perl/mcli.pl hosts_to_execute_cmd_on esxcfg-syslog --show
everest.primp-industries.com:
No remote syslog server configured.
himalaya.primp-industries.com:
No remote syslog server configured.