Tools

ESXTOP not displaying properly?

dvdmorera Other Techy Stuff, Tools , , ,

I’ve seen quite a few posts lately about ESXTOP not displaying properly. Long story short, esxtop does not display the interactive UI and displays the CSV output instead.

If your esxtop looks like this, then you need to change the terminal declaration to something like xterm. Notice here (red rectangle), how the terminal is set to xterm-256color.

xterm-256color

 

You can change the terminal declaration from the cli, but this is not persistent through sessions.

To do this simply type “TERM=xterm“.

To display the current terminal declaration type “echo $TERM”

termxterm

 

 

This will display esxtop interface properly.

esxtop

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you want this change to persist, just change your favorite terminal settings to xterm from its current setting. For example, I use my Mac’s terminal to ssh into my lab, the terminal is set to xterm-256color, which causes the display issue. So, I just opened the terminal preferences and changed the declaration to xterm. By default, putty identifies itself as xterm(1), so no need to change that. If putty is set to something else, then you can change the terminal-type string from the Connection>Data section.

term_declaration

 

HTML 5 – vSphere and ESXi Host Web Clients

dvdmorera Tools, vCenter, vSphere , , , ,

H5The wait is over (almost). Since the introduction of vSphere Web Client, many admins have slowed down the adoption of the Web Client as well as updates to vSphere due to the performance of said client.

VMware has released a couple of flings in relation to this problem. One of them was the host web client, where you can manage your hosts directly without the need to install the vSphere client. This fling is now part of the latest update to vSphere 6.0 U2. A few days ago, VMware released a similar option for vCenter. Both of these options are based on HTML 5 and javascript.

Host Web Client

Like I mentioned before, starting with vSphere 6.0 U2, the host web client is already embedded into vSphere. If you do not have this update you can still download the OVA and access the host web client that way. Currently it only works if you have vSphere 6.0+ but once version 5.5 U3 is released, it will also work with that version. Here is a link to download the fling.

To access the web client, you will need to add “/ui” at the end of the name/ip address of your host. For example https://<host-name-or-IP>/ui

The client is very responsive and has a nice UI. Not all the features are currently supported, but more will be coming at some point in the near future.

host_ui

 

vCenter Web Client

This HTML web client is only available as a fling at the moment. You will need to deploy an OVA and register the appliance with the vCenter that you would like to manage. Being a fling, not all features are included. It basically focuses on VM management, but I am sure they are working to port all the features over at some point (I hope).

To deploy this ova, you will need to enable SSH and Bash Shell on your VCSA. You can do both from the VCSA web UI. If you are running Windows based vCenter refer to the Fling documentation here.

vcsa_uI-shell

Prior to going through the configuration you will need to

  1. Create an IP Pool (If deploying via C# Client)
    • Note: I deployed using Web Client and didn’t create the IP Pool for me automatically as it is supposed to, so double check you have an IP Pool before powering on the appliance
  2. Deploy the OVA

IP_Pool

After deploying the OVA, creating an IP Pool, and enabling both SSH and Bash Shell on VCSA, it is time to configure the appliance.

  • SSH to the IP address you gave to the appliance using root as the user and demova as the password
  • Type shell to access Bash Shell
  • run the following command in Bash Shell
    • /etc/init.d/vsphere-client configure –start yes –user root –vc <FQDN or IP of vCenter> –ntp <FQDN or IP of NTP server>
  • If you need to change the default password for your root account, you can run the following command from bash shell
    • /usr/bin/chsh -s “/bin/bash” root
  • answer the question by answering YES
  • and enter the credentials for your vCenter


H5_deploy1

H5_deploy2

 

The HTML Web Client is pretty awesome, I gotta say, even if not all the features are there yet. It is super clean, and responsive. I can’t wait for it to be embedded with a full feature set.

 

H5_1

H5_2

NetApp: Pimp your Dashboard with Grafana

dvdmorera NetApp, Tools , , ,

For those that went to either NetApp Insight US or EMEA, the grafana UI used for the Neto’s wicked demo looks very familiar.

NetApp recently released a tool called Harvest, which extracts information from the ONTAP nodes/clusters as well as OnCommand Unified Manager (OCUM) and presents such information in a really cool dashboard. This advaced Performance Monitoring  already includes pre-built metrics for both performance and capacity that will allow any NetApp admin to quickly look at many, many key aspects of the environment, and quickly discern whether or not there are any bottlenecks/issues.

I like to think of this tool as OCUM (OnCommand Unified Manager) in steroids, with a hint of OPM (OnCommand Performance Manager) (maybe the other way around) and a great UI. Instructions here. This tool is so cool, we are starting to offer this to our customers.

Grafana

The complete solution is composed of NetApp’s Harvest tool, Graphite for DB and parsing and Grafana as the Web UI. Harvest is available to download from NetApp’s support page, and both Graphite and Grafana are open source (free).

Chris Madden (NetApp), has created a cool video about this solution, as well as step-by-step deployment instructions here.