This blog post will be building on a previous post where I built a small PXE server environment for ESXi installation. In this post we will enhance the PXE install with customized kickstart files specific for the hardware we want to install. There’s two new components to discuss here. The kickstart file (ks.cfg) it self and how to point to it during PXE boot. Let’s take a look at the current environment The tftp server root is located at /var/lib/tftpboot and my images is stored as directories under this directory.
I had the privilege of delivering 3 sessions at VMUG Norway this week in Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen. With the extremely nice weather in Norway this week in mind the attendance were great and as always the discussions were valuable. My session on vSphere Performance monitoring were the short version of the blog series I did about how we built our solution for doing performance monitoring of vSphere with InfluxDB and Grafana, and how we easily can customize with adding metrics and datasources.
I’ll be speaking at VMUG Norway’s meetings this May. As always there will be «three sessions in three cities». Oslo, May 29th Trondheim, May 30th Bergen, May 31st The topic for my session will be how we have built our own vSphere Performance monitoring solution which I’ve also done a blog series about. The VMUG meetings are free, for more information check out https://www.vmug.com/norway. I hope you’re able to join!
At work I have done some monitoring projects which I’ve done many blog posts about. At home I have a small vSphere environment serving partially as a Lab but it also runs some services we use at home. Of course I do monitoring of this environment as well, and I use both InfluxDB and Grafana as we do at work. One of my VMs runs Plex Media Server and recently I moved my media library to a separate box running FreeNAS.
In my blog series on building a solution for monitoring vSphere Performance we have scripts for pulling VM and Host performance. I did some changes to those recently, mainly by adding some more metrics for instance for VDI hosts. This post will be about how we included our VSAN environments to the performance monitoring. This has gotten a great deal easier after the Get-VSANStat cmdlet came along in recent versions of PowerCLI.
In our environment we run ESXi primarily on HPE Proliant servers. We use OneView for managing the hardware it self (i.e. monitoring, firmware), but for provisioning ESXi to the servers we have been doing some of it manually and some of it with HPE Insight Control Server Provisioning (ICsp). When preparing for deployment of a new batch of servers we found that Proliant Gen10 servers is not supported by ICsp.
We have quite a few Blade Enclosures with BL460c server blades in them and have been happy with those. For managing these we are primarly using HPE OneView and in some cases the Onboard Administrator (OA). Our latest batch of new hardware however was DL360 and DL380 rack servers. These will also be managed by OneView primarly, but initially we need to do some iLO config on each server which in the case of blades are done by the OA.
Last year we started building our own solution for Performance Monitoring of our Infrastructure platform with the focus on the VMware vSphere environment. The components used for this solution is PowerCLI for extracting the metrics, InfluxDB for storing the metrics, and Grafana for presenting the metrics. I did a Blog series on this project which explains in detail what we did when building the solution. The solution has been very well received and are used daily by many of my colleagues, and we frequently update the solution with new metrics and dashboards.
In a previous post I’ve talked about issues in the StoragePolicy and Tag cmdlets in PowerCLI. I found a workaround by ignoring certificate warnings and setting my date format to en-US. Today I tried to replicate some Storage Policies from one vCenter to another and I found that I got new errors… I can export the policies without issues, but when I try to Import the policy to the new vCenter I get the following error: »Object reference not set to an instance of an object».
We all love today’s modern web with lots of API’s available, both for retrieving information from various sources, gaining additional insights and for transform and enrich your data. Most API’s today are RESTFUL, meaning that they should follow the REST principles. REST is not a standard, it’s more a guideline for how to design your API. With the REST guidelines in place many API’s share the same or similar structure and with that it gets easier to work with API’s as you can make use of the same techniques.
