Category: powershell

PureStorage + REST API + Splunk = Fun with Data about Data

A few months back I posted a powershell script to post Pure Storage data directly into VMware vCenter Operations Manager (now called vRealize Operations). Inspiration hit me like a brick when a big customer of mine said, “Do you have a plugin for Splunk?”

He already wrote some scripts in python to pull data from our REST API. He just said, “Sure wish I didn’t have to do this myself.” I took the hint. Now I am not a python person, so I did the best I could with the tools I have.
You will notice that the script is very similar to the one I wrote for vCOPS. That is because open REST API’s rock, if you don’t have one for your product you are wrong. 🙂

The formatting in WordPress ALWAYS breaks scripts when I paste them. So head over to GitHub and download the script today.
https://github.com/2vcps/post-rest2splunk/tree/master

Like before I schedule this as a task to run every 5 minutes. That seems to not explode the tiny Splunk VM I am running in VMware Fusion to test this out.

Dashboards. Check.

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Some very basic Dashboards I created. I am not a Splunk ninja, perhaps you know one? I am sure people that have done this for a while can pull much better visuals out of this data.

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Pivot Table

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Stats from a Lab array some Averages computed by Splunk.

Gauge Report of Max Latency (that is micro seconds)

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A 1000 of these is 1 millisecond 🙂 pretty nice.

From Wikipedia
A microsecond is an SI unit of time equal to one millionth (0.000001 or 10−6 or 1/1,000,000) of a second. Its symbol is μs. One microsecond is to one second as one second is to 11.574 days. A microsecond is equal to 1000 nanoseconds or 1/1,000 milliseconds.

Even if everything else didn’t help you at least you learned that today. Right?

The link to github again https://github.com/2vcps/post-rest2splunk/tree/master

Dynamic Cluster Pooling

Dynamic Cluster Pooling is an idea that Kevin Miller ( @captainstorage) and I came up with one day while we were just rapping out some ideas on the whiteboard. It is an incomplete idea, but may have the beginnings of something useful. The idea is that clusters can be dynamically sized depending on expected workload. Today a VMware Cluster is sized based on capacity estimates from something like VMware Capacity Planner. The problem is this method requires you apply a workload profile across all time periods or situations. What if only a couple days of the month require the full capacity of a cluster. Could those resources be used elsewhere the rest of the month?

Example Situation
Imagine a scenario with a Virtual Infrastructure with multiple clusters. Cluster “Gold” has 8 hosts. Cluster “Bronze” has 8 hosts. Gold is going to require additionally resources on the last day of the month to process reports from a database (or something like that). In order to provide additional resources to Gold we will take an ESX host away from the Bronze cluster. This allows us to deploy additional Virtual Machines to crunch through the process or allow less contention for the existing machines.

You don’t have to be a powercli guru to figure out how to vMotion all the machines off of a ESX host and place it in maintenance mode. Once the host is in maintenance mode it can be moved to the new cluster, removed from maintenance mode and VM’s can be redistributed by DRS.

Sample Code more to prove the concept:
#Connect to the vCenter
Connect-VIServer [vcenterserver]
#indentify the host, you should pass the host or hosts you want to vacate into a variable
Get-Cluster Cluster-Bronze | get-vmhost

#Find the least loaded host(skipping for now)

#Vmotion the machines to somewhere else in that cluster
Get-VMHost lab1.domain.local | Get-VM| Move-VM -Destination [some other host in the bronze cluster]

#Move the host
Set-VMHost lab1.domain.local -State Maintenance
Move-VMHost lab1.domain.local -Destination Cluster-Gold
Set-VMHost lab1.domain.local -State Connected

#Rebalance VM's
Get-DrsRecommendation -Cluster Cluster-Gold | Apply-DrsRecommendation

I was able to manually make this happen in our lab. Maybe if this sparks any interest someone that is good with “the code” can make this awesome.

Virtual Twits Powershell Script

I know, about 9 other people already posted Alan Renouf’s list of virtualization people to follow in twitter. The really cool thing is the powershell script to add everyone. I promise I was going to mention it even before I was added to the list. Now that @2vcps made the list it just seems like shameless self promotion. Oh well.

Great work Alan with help from MindofRoot and thanks for making the list.

*Alan, thanks for pointing out my error…