Tag: vsphere

Back to basics: Daily checks

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Something I still hear a lot that system engineers take their vSphere environment for granted and hardly check anything on a daily basis. I always point them at Alan Renouf‘s brilliant health check script while there are other ways to get your daily dose of health this one still rocks for me. You can remove unwanted plugins or make different selections of plugins for daily, weekly or monthly checks. Now and then I still hear people that had issues because of snapshots and there is no need for that anymore and hasn’t been for years! This script has saved me lots of times already + it helped me get management support for limiting other people’s access to the environment because they had no idea what they where doing.

Example of the output you can get:

2016-07-03 20_13_59-192.168.0.11 vCheck

 

Timecheck please!

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Something I still see now and then, and have had big issues with in the past, is the time on ESXi hosts. Sometimes no ntp servers have been set or the ESXi hosts can’t connect to them. Other times ntp servers have been set but not the time so they’re still off. Normally this shouldn’t be a problem but since a VM always takes on the time of the hosts it is moving to during a vmotion this can cause issues on database servers.

In my last situation the ntp servers where correct but the time was off and somehow never properly synced to the ntp hosts. To fix this I created 2 scripts, one to check the ntp settings and current time and another to set the time.

$style = "<style>BODY{font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;}"
$style = $style + "TABLE{border: 1px solid black; border-collapse: collapse;}"
$style = $style + "TH{border: 1px solid black; background: #dddddd; padding: 5px; }"
$style = $style + "TD{border: 1px solid black; padding: 5px; }"
$style = $style + "</style>"
$esxihosts=Get-VMHost | Sort Name | Select Name,  @{N="NTPServer";E={$_ |Get-VMHostNtpServer}}, Timezone, @{N="CurrentTime";E={(Get-View $_.ExtensionData.ConfigManager.DateTimeSystem) | Foreach {$_.QueryDateTime().ToLocalTime()}}}, @{N="ServiceRunning";E={(Get-VmHostService -VMHost $_ |Where-Object {$_.key-eq "ntpd"}).Running}} 
$esxihosts | convertto-html -head $style -property  name,NTPServer,TimeZone,CurrentTime,ServiceRunning | out-file timecheck.html
start timecheck.html

Nothing fancy, you need to be connected to your vcenter in advance but it makes and opens a nice html file with your ntp settings and current time on your ESXi hosts.

This is the output it makes:

2016-05-24 20_23_21-Mozilla Firefox

Then it was time to make the other script, since sometimes it might take a few secs to set the time I decided to check my local time before every set of a time on an ESXi host.

Get-VMHost | Where-Object {
$t = Get-Date
$dst = $_ | %{ Get-View $_.ExtensionData.ConfigManager.DateTimeSystem }
$dst.UpdateDateTime((Get-Date($t.ToUniversalTime()) -format u))
}

Again nothing fancy but it does the trick perfectly.