April 2009 - The Practical Administrator

10th Powershell virtual usergroup announced

2009-04-212015-12-21 by Glenn

UPDATE: Due to a schedualing conflict the meeting has been moved to Thursday May 7th, 2009 at 8:00PM EST (lucky number 7 should be a good meeting)

Marco announced yesterday that the 10th Powershell Virtual User group will be held on Thursday April 30th, 2009 at 8:00PM EST. On the schedule will be Bart De Smet (Microsoft), Sergei Anotonov (Microsoft), and Your’s truely!

I will be presenting Managing NetApp via Powershell, and plan on covering the OnTap SDK as well as my own PoshOnTap V2 module.

All the details can be found here

See you there
~Glenn

Cacti templates for NetApp’s CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI

2009-04-162017-09-27 by Andrew Sullivan

Update 2010-07-21: If you are interested in graphing operations and latency for NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, FCP and/or SAN protocols on a per volume basis, you may want to see this post.

Update 2009-07-21: As requested by Dave, I have posted an FCP template and script. I have no way of testing them (no FCP…), but I think they should work.

I’m one of those people who has to know everything that is going on inside my infrastructure at all times. ESX, vCenter, MySQL, SQL Server, NetApp…I keep close tabs on all of them using both Cacti and Nagios.

Some people might find it strange that I have both running, but the two applications have very different functions. Cacti is superb at trend analysis and detecting abnormalities after the fact (only occasionally during the event). I use it’s data to determine, for example, when is a good time for Exchange to take an outage based on the number of users connected and the number of RPC requests occurring. Nagios, on the other hand, is extremely well suited to real time monitoring and alerting. It checks different data points at intervals and if it finds one out of the accepted range, it tells me.

Anyway, back to the point. I created these graphs to give me detailed information about CIFS, NFS and iSCSI on my NetApp filers. I have used these against FAS270s, FAS2020s and FAS6030s running OnTAP 7.2.1.1, 7.2.5.1 and/or 7.3.1 with success against them all.

In addition to the below templates I use some additional graphs to track other metrics. Those graphs are available here:

NetApp Filer: graphing Performance Stats and IO’s (template) (be sure to apply the performance tweak found here)
NetApp Graphs

As I get time (which is rare) I plan on adding additional graphs, when I do, I will post them here. I would like to get and graph ASIS information, WAFL stats, and space information (raw, formatted, usable, allocated, overhead for the filer as a whole). If anyone has, or knows where to find, these graphs, please let me know!

Migrate vCenter database from SQL Express to full SQL Server

2009-04-132017-09-27 by Andrew Sullivan

These are the steps I used to move vCenter’s SQL Express database to a standalone SQL Server instance. I did this for two reasons: 1) my server and VM count exceeded the number recommended for use by SQL Express, and 2) I wanted better control over the database. Theoretically, your steps should be very similar, but not exactly the same. Please keep this in mind if you attempt this process using these directions.

Before you do anything, backup your current vCenter database. This is your fall back plan should the entire thing get borked, consequentially this is probably the most important step!

Should you encounter any problems during this process the KB is your friend. Some articles to read (before hand even!) are 1003928, 7960893, and 1478. VMware has published a document specifically about using SQL Server for vCenter here. If you are not friends with your (or any…) DBA, go buy him/her a beer now…they should be an integral part of this process as they have probably done things similar to this many times!

Perl Toolkit: pNIC to vSwitch information

2009-04-092017-09-27 by Andrew Sullivan

Another itch to scratch: which vSwitch is a pNIC connected to? To solve this simple problem I created a quick perl script…

This script also lets me see the driver in use, connection speed and duplex setting, and the MAC address of the pNIC.

# Sample output:
Adaptor (Driver)        Speed (Duplex)          MAC                     vSwitch
----------------        --------------          ---                     -------
vmnic1 (bnx2)           1000 (Full)             00:00:00:00:00:00       vSwitch0
vmnic0 (tg3)            1000 (Full)             00:00:00:00:00:00       vSwitch0
vmnic3 (tg3)            1000 (Full)             00:00:00:00:00:00       vSwitch1
vmnic2 (bnx2)           1000 (Full)             00:00:00:00:00:00       vSwitch1

# Sample output:

Adaptor (Driver) Speed (Duplex) MAC vSwitch

---------------- -------------- --- -------

vmnic1 (bnx2) 1000 (Full) 00:00:00:00:00:00 vSwitch0

vmnic0 (tg3) 1000 (Full) 00:00:00:00:00:00 vSwitch0

vmnic3 (tg3) 1000 (Full) 00:00:00:00:00:00 vSwitch1

vmnic2 (bnx2) 1000 (Full) 00:00:00:00:00:00 vSwitch1

Perl Toolkit: Portgroup type information

2009-04-072017-09-27 by Andrew Sullivan

I wanted get a list of port groups and their type (kernel, console, virtual machine) from a series of hosts, however the only thing I could find that was even close was a POSH script in the VMTN forums that was posted by LucD.

Using that script for inspiration, I essentially duplicated the functionality, but using the perl toolkit. This script gives me an easy to read (and parse…) list of portgroups, the vSwitch they belong to, and the type.