Update Notice

I do like to keep my older post up-to-date (as long as it makes sense). For that reason these posts have been updated:

• ESXi 4.1 Unattended Installation an Overview
• VMware, Versions, Updates and Builds

By the Way, per April 28^th 2011, VMware hast just released Patch Release ESXi410-201104001 for ESXi 4.1. See this KB for more info.

ESXi How to start syslogd?

While configuring an ESXi server to sent logging to a syslog server, nothing happened. After some time I found out that for an unknown reason, on the ESXi server the syslog service has stopped. Here are the steps to check and resolve this issue.

1. Log in as root on the ESXi server, see KB 1017910 how to log in on a ESXi server.
2. Execute this command to check: # ps | grep syslog
3. If there is no output, syslog has stopped.
   
4. To restart syslog, just type this command: # syslogd
   
5. Again, do the check, now it should show something like:
   <process number> busybox   syslogd

That’s all.

VMware vCenter Operations Standard – Part 2: First look

In my previous post about vCenter Operations Standard (from now on vCOPS), I showed you how to install vCOPS and do some initial configuration.

After completion it is time to discover the features of this tool. My first action was to configure SMTP. As a regular user of tools like Nagios, I like to receive notifications in case of trouble. Unfortunately, after filling in the required fields, there is no button to Test your email configuration!

So let us go back to vCOPS, the first thing to notice, is the complete different look and feel of what we are used to in vCenter and other Solutions and Applications. VMware Update Manager and VMware Data Recovery, seamlessly integrate in vCenter.

vCOPS can completely run in a browser, that gives the opportunity to easily switch between vCOPS and vCenter

After my first tour, I was a bit confused and lost. So I returned to the “Installation and Administration Guide” which contains a section about the main concepts of vCOPS. So I learned about Workloads, Health, Capacity, attributes, metrics, dynamic- and hard thresholds, key performance indicators and probable causes, but still fuzzy…