Tag Archives: VMware

Automating My Home Lab Part 1

Automation, Bolt, Puppet, , , ,

ESXi, Puppet Bolt, and the OVFTool

In a moment of quiet I started to think about how to improve my home lab VM deployment strategy although strategy is a strong word for it ! Currently I use basic server build ESXi virtual machines for 2K12 R2, 2K16, and 2K19 that have been sysprep’d and perform an autologon to set the machine name, IP details, and join the Domain. The Powershell script I use pulls variables from the vmx file or prompts me to set the details if I forget to add them. Not the most elegant of solutions but it did mean I could deploy a new VM in about 15 minutes albeit with a lot of manual intevention.

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Nagios Pi Part Three

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Nagios Pi Part Three

Since my last post I’ve been mostly looking at how to start and shut down my environment at a certain times with success in starting but failure in shutting down.

The starting of my environment was an easy enough task with a simple bash script to send WOL packets to my hosts and using a For loop to fire it off five times for good measure.

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Nagios Pi – Implementing check_vmware_esx.pl

Nagios, Nagios Core, Raspberry Pi, , , ,

Nagios Pi – Implementing check_vmware_esx.pl

This article explains how to implement the check_vmware_esx.pl Nagios plugin on to a Raspberry Pi running Raspian Buster Lite.

The check_vmware_esx plugin has been developed by Martin Fuerstenau to monitor VMware through Nagios and is available on github here

Pre-Requisites

In order to implement the check_vmware_esx.pl script the following pre-requisites must be met:

  • The following Perl modules installed:
    • File::Basename
    • HTTP::Date
    • Getopt::Long
    • Time::Duration
    • Time::HiRes
  • VMware Perl SDK is installed

VMware Perl SDK Installation

For this article I used the VMware Perl SDK 6.5 and rather than using the vmware-installer.pl I had to download the i386 version of the SDK and then followed the solution steps from stumpr which I found on the VMware communities site here.

Note: As stated in the thread VMware will not support the SDK installed in by this method.

tar zxf VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK-6.5.0-4566394.i386.tar.gz
  • Copy the vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib/lib/VMware/share/VMware folder to /usr/share/perl5 using the following command
sudo cp -r /tmp/vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib/lib/VMware/share/VMware /usr/share/perl5/.
  • Download the check_vmware_esx-master .zip zip file from github and copy it to /tmp
  • Unzip the file using the following command:
unzip check_vmware_esx-master.zip
  • Copy the check_vmware_esx.pl script to /usr/local/nagios/libexec using the following command:
sudo cp check_vmware_esx.pl /usr/local/nagios/libexec/.
  • Copy the modules folder to  /usr/share/perl5/VMware using the following command:
sudo cp -r modules /usr/share/perl5/VMware/.

At this point when I tried to run the script I encountered the error error “Can’t locate help.pm in @inc (you may need to install the help module)” when running check_vmware_esx.pl

To resolve this error perform the following steps.

  • Edit the check_vmware_esx.pl script and find the line below:
#use lib "/usr/lib/nagios/vmware/modules";
  • Edit the line and change it to the line below:
#use lib "/usr/share/perl5/VMware/modules";
  • Save and exit the script

Testing it works

Once installed successfully you can test it from the command line by performing the following steps:

  • Change directory to /usr/local/nagios/libexec and execute the script to check the CPU on an ESXi host as follows:
sudo ./check_vmware_esx.pl -H 192.168.0.100 -f authfile -S cpu

Note: I’m using an authfile for the authentication to my ESXi hosts but you can use the -u and -p options to provide a username and a password.

  • If all works then it should return something similar to the line below:
OK: CPU wait=317534.00 ms - CPU ready=554.00 ms - CPU usage=2.89%|'cpu_wait'=317534.00ms;;;; 'cpu_ready'=554.00ms;;;; 'cpu_usage'=2.89%;;;;