Top 20 vCenter Performance Metrics to Care About - NTPRO.NL - Eric Sloof. vCenter Custom Alarms: Instruction, Tips, Tools « Pivot Point. Half a year ago the Asia Pacific vSpecialist team made a fantastic acquisition in one David “Two Screws” Lloyd. David previously worked for a wonderful VMware and EMC customer in the UK and moved back to Australia. That is when we jumped on the opportunity to snap him up. In working with him in the labs recently, I have come to realize that David has incredible depth and breadth in the space of virtual infrastructure management.
Recently David sat down to share his tips on setting up alarms in vCenter. Here is David’s demo on YouTube: (A high resolution version of the video is available here.) David was kind enough to provide me a write-up of his work with details on the why and how of this process. vCenter Based Storage Port Monitoring The above video demonstrates the creation of custom alarms in vCenter to monitor host level storage port failures.
When a command is executed as a custom action, it is run in a Windows shell. An example of an event created by the tool is shown below. VirtuallyGhetto. VMware ESXi Chronicles: ESXi 4.1 Active Directory Integration. Although day-to-day vSphere management operations are usually done on vCenter Server logged in through the vSphere Client, there are instances when users must work with ESXi directly, such as with configuration backup and log file access. Then there are monitoring solutions, which sometimes require direct access to the ESXi host; these would typically be configured to use service accounts. Prior to ESXi 4.1, you could only create local users, which each had separate locally-stored passwords per host.
Since this is cumbersome and doesn’t scale, we decided to address this in the vSphere 4.1 release. With ESXi 4.1, you can configure the host to join an Active Directory domain, and any user trying to access the host will automatically be authenticated against the centralized user directory. You can still have local users defined and managed on a host-by-host basis and configured using the vSphere client, vCLI or PowerCLI. The only user defined by default on the system is the root user.
How cool is TPS? » Yellow Bricks. Frank and I have discussed this topic multiple times and it was briefly mentioned in Frank’s excellent series about over-sizing virtual machines; Zero Pages, TPS and the impact of a boot-storm. Pre-vSphere 4.1 we have seen it all happen, a host fails and multiple VMs need to be restarted.
Temporary contention exists as it could take up to 60 minutes before TPS completes. Or of course when the memory pressure thresholds are reached the VMkernel requests TPS to scan memory and collapse pages if and where possible. However, this is usually already too late resulting in ballooning or compressing (if your lucky) and ultimately swapping. If it is an HA initiated “boot-storm” or for instance you VDI users all powering up those desktops at the same time, the impact is the same. Now one of the other things I also wanted to touch on was Large Pages, as this is the main argument our competitors are using against TPS.
A zero page is simply the memory page that is all zeros. Be Sociable, Share!
San.