This is something that we get on a regular basis from the security team. When doing their regular security scans for compliance and vulnerabilities I always get a long list of ESX hosts. The scans normally come back and complain about an OpenSSH x11 vulnerability or an OpenSSH Memory and Buffer Overflow.
These seem to be False positives from the tool being used to scan the hosts. We always make sure that we have installed the necessary updates related to OpenSSH as VMware releases them. But the tool always comes back with these issues. It seems to stem from the fact that the tool looks at OpenSSH in generic terms and assumes that all vendors implement it in the same way. From the documents listed below VMware indicates that since ESX 3.x VMware no longer included the x11 packages with their products. I would recommend that you make sure you are up to date on your patches and if the scans still come back dirty that you should discuss this results with the Application vendor that created the scanning tool. You might find out that this is common and they are just false positives.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
Just to be upfront Veeam has a blogger contest running from the date of this article to August 30th, 2010. The basis of this contest is the blogger that drives the most downloads of this new FREE Veeam product. Veeam will then donate $1000 to the winners selected charity and the second place blogger will get to donate $250 to their charity. So I urge you to use this DOWNLOAD LINK and try this cool product from Veeam. Nothing would make me feel better by helping my readers discover a sweet free tool and in turn help me with a chance to help out a local charity in my area. Ok enough with the details and now I can talk about the product info.
The team over at Veeam has been hard at work and is releasing a Free version of their Veeam Reporter tool. The free version joins several other popular free tools that Veeam already offers. The free version of Veeam Reporter includes all of the core features of the paid version with no limits on your number of Hosts, Virtual Machines or size of your data archive. If you want to see the comparison of the free and paid products you can download the PDF here. The release of the free tool also coincides with the update of the paid product to 4.1 version which is adding Capacity Planning to the list of features.
The Veeam Reporter tool both the Free and Paid versions focus on Enterprise reporting, Change management and Capacity Planning. You can report on these important factors and use this to correct any pending pitfalls. Have a look at the short video that I created that shows how simple the product is to setup and begin creating reports. Oh and don’t for get to Download Veeam Report FreeEdition.
The new Veeam Reporter Free Edition 4.1 is a powerful tool in it’s own right. I will be using it in my environments in the near future as I dig more into the reports and see how much value I can pull out of them. If you are considering purchasing the full version of this then the Free edition is a great way to get your feet wet in the Veeam Reporter world.
Here are a few of the reports that I will be looking to use in my world. I will use the Infrastructure Change report to find out any that has recently changed that could help in troubleshooting an issue, granted in the free version I will be limited to 24 hours of data. I will also be trying out the capacity reports pack to see if it can produce some of the reports that we may need to create via scripting soon. And lastly the I’ll be working with the Performance Report Pack to see how the reports can help me keep a watchful eye on Host and VM performance. There are many other reports available in the tool but there are just a few that interested me initially.
So in closing your probably wondering man this sounds great why would I need to buy the Full version of the tool. Well here are a the features not available in the Free edition that greatly benefit large environments. You can download the Reporter Free Tool from Veeam here.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
The team at VKernel have announced the release of Chargeback 2.0. The new release extends chargeback support to both Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and VMware ESX environments. While I don’t know of many mixed environment shops yet, but I know that people will continue to move this direction. It’s nice to see vendors begin to update tools to support multiple vendors. I have not had a chance to look at this product yet but plan to test it in the future and will write up something about my experience. You can read more at their site http://www.vkernel.com/products/chargeback
Some text from their press release
The release also adds support for mixed chargeback models. VKernel Chargeback 2.0 now supports both allocated and actual resource consumption models. By reporting on both measures, infrastructure teams can chargeback for actual resource consumption, allocated resources, or simply show application teams the difference in real dollars between their allocated capacity and actual usage. This cost visibility is critical to capacity management, reducing VM spral and supporting private cloud initiatives.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
After a recent release of a comparison chart from VMware marketing it appears that VKernel is also taking the gloves off. In the past the two parties seem to be playing nice and VMware was not actively marketing the CapacityIQ product. But VMware seems to be on the attack now and is no longer going to concede this segment to third parties. I recently received the email listed below from VKernel as their response to VMware’s actions, They feel their product stands up against VMware CapacityIQ and is willing to offer administrators a challenge.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
I’ve seen a few other guides for this same type of install. I just wanted to put something together to save for myself. I will show you how to use the EDA deployment appliance to install vSphere in VMware Workstation. You can follow most of the same steps for a physical machine install with just a few changes.
For this I was testing things for my home lab and created this on my laptop just using Workstation 7.0. I created two virtual machines, one for the EDA appliance and one blank that will get ESX 4.0 installed from the Deployment script.
Step 2: Import the EDA virtual appliance into VMware workstation.
Step 3: After the input I had to add in a CD-Rom to the VM and attached the vSphere .iso file to the CD drive.
Step 4: You can then start up the EDA appliance and choose Reconfigure.
Step 5: Fill out your network information on the screen shown below. Then press enter or click on OK.
Step 6: You can now log into the configuration web page for the EDA appliance. In my configuration it was http://192.168.1.19
The default login for the page is root - root. You will be presented with several sections that will allow you to configure options for the install. I will briefly cover these parts as I did not change much on them for this test. The Post installation commands section allows you to script any custom changes or adds that you want to make for your install. The General settings section is used for basic network and disk settings for each install, this section is pretty easy to understand.
Step 7: Now you are ready to prepare the Host specific details. Refer to the image below as I describe the steps. You can either modify the sample host that is loaded by default. By clicking on the host name or selecting “new host” you will get a screen like the 2nd picture below. This will allow you to specify host name and IP addresses needed for your base install. Once created if you click on the “ks” link for the hostname you will see what the kick start file contains for commands.
Step 8: Now you will need to setup the options for the DHCP server. Upon clicking on the “configure DHCP server” link from the top menu you will be presented with the following configuration file. I highlighted a few of the important lines that I changed to work for my setup. You will need to make sure all of the normal DHCP options are set in this file.
Step 9: Now you will need to “import PXE files” so that you can boot the server that you will be installing ESX onto. You need to make sure that the ESX CD or .iso file is mounted to your EDA appliance. If the ESX disc or file is properly mounted you will see the confirmation in the top right just like the image below. Then you select the “Import PXE bootfiles” from the menu and you will see a screen like the second image below.
Step 10: If you are using a physical server to install onto you can start now and have the machine PXE boot.
If you are going to use a virtual machine you need to create a VM with the proper OS select, disk size, memory and number of Nic’s that you wish to use. Once this is done you will see a screen like the one below you start the install. I trust that you know what settings need to be used for installing ESX into VMware workstation, if not there are plenty of good guides for it. If you are using Workstation 7.x the process is now built in and very easy to select from the OS choices.
Note: If you created multiple host install names you will get presented with the options and can type the name of the one you wish to install. I circled in red above as an example.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
The VGC is probably my personal favorite from VMware Labs so far. It is a simple but powerful utility with some cool features you don’t get with the standard vSphere client. I wrote about VMware guest console in the past covering its basic features that you can read here. Listed below are the latest features to be added or updated to this little Gem. You can have a look at VMware labs and download VGC for yourself here.
Performance & Scalability -
VM retrieval is enhanced to discover VMs in much lesser time.
VGC can manage up to 315 Powered On VMs on all connected servers. Number of VMs retrieved from a server will be limited once this limit is reached.
Support for 64 bit Windows has been added.
Remote Console feature has been extended to work with VMs hosted on vCenter.
Workspace files created with this version of VGC will be encrypted. However, workspace files created using earlier versions are not compatible with this release.
VM Templates are differentiated from regular VMs.
Workspace files can now be loaded in VGC by double clicking the .vgc files.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
