Category: VMWare

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Changing passwords? lets make it as difficult as we can…

In this day and age of computer hacks and security problems, why do companies make it awkward to change usernames and or passwords? One example of an awkward procedure to change a password is on the VMware vCenter server. If like any good security minded person you have all  your passwords set to expire every 28 days or so, to change the password on the vCenter server you have to do some “command line fu” to change it. Heaven forbid that you have to change the username as well. So how do you do it? Well if you are running vCenter on a Windows 2008 server and connecting to a Oracle server (that actually holds all the data) there are a couple of things you need to do:

  1. Shutdown the vCenter server (disable it in the Services Control panel)
  2. Change the password for your vCenter user in the oracle DB
  3. Now here it the BIG gotcha. On the windows side you have to run a CMD prompt as an admin user. Just clicking on it in the start menu won’t do it. You have to right click on it and do “Run as Administrator”. If you fail to do this, the next step will fail and just piss you off even more. (The reason for this is the username and password are stored in the registry and I guess running cmd as normal user revokes all privs to modify the registry.)
  4. Now go to the location where VMware vCenter is installed and run the vpxd command with either a -p or a -P. If you use the lower case -p it will prompt you for the new database user password. If you use the -P option, right after the P you can put the new password on the command line.
  5. Now you should be able to start back up the vCenter processes.

Now if you need to change the userid, you need to use Regedit and go to :

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\VMware VirtualCenter\DB (under My Computer)
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\VMware, Inc.\VMware VirtualCenter\DB for 64 bit versions of Windows.

and change #2 to be the new userid.

This is documented in the VMware KB Article : Changing the vCenter database userid and password. But if you don’t pay attention go the run as part, you will spend a lot of time trying to figure it out even if you are logged in as an administrator.

 

If your password expires in Oracle while vCenter is up and running, it appears to continue to work while it is up. But if you reboot the vCenter server or restart the vCenter processes, it will “hang” and never start. They also need to make their error messages a little more detailed as to why it is ‘failing’ to start.

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VMWare and Sun Gigaswift Ethernet cards

I began setting up my new sun server and san at home the other day.. (Picked up a Sun V20Z and a Sun T3 SAN Disk array very cheap)… Because I am going to be doing some IPv6 testing as well, I installed a Sun Gigaswift (aka Sun’s ce, Cassini Ethernet) card in to the machine along with the fibre channel card. I put the VMWare vSphere 4i cd in and went on with the install. But didn’t really pay attention that it did not see the CE card, just the two broadcom cards.. So I went ahead any ways thinking I will fix it later. But it seems that there is no drivers on the interweb for the Sun CE card for vmware? If any one knows of a place to get them let me know? Otherwise I will have to find a new card to use in it’s place.

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VMWare Fusion tip

For some reason last night my Windows XP image in VMWare fusion locked up during a update to the Microsoft Security stuff. I tried doing the “Virtual Machine -> Shutdown” which looked like it was going to work. However Windows just set for ever on the “Shutting Down Windows” screen. Well if you hold down the Option key when you click on the “Virtual Machine” menu item, the word “Force” shows up in front of all the options. This is the equivalent of pressing the power button when you click “Force Shutdown”. With out that, VMWare is trying to do a “nice” shutdown. So I forced a “reset” and everything came up fine… Hope this helps some one else who is “hung”

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vSphere4i cloning

Have been playing around with VMWare’s vSphere 4i today. One of the major differences between it and the full version is being able to clone and make templates out of VM images. What I did today was setup a machine with a bunch of Solaris VM’s. But I did not want to installed them all from scratch. On the full version of ESX, cloning is supported for Windows and I believe Linux, but don’t think it is for Solaris. So to do the poor mans clone of Solaris was what I needed to do. So how do you do it? Sort of simple:

1. Install one of the VM’s from scratch from either a CD or ISO Image. (You can upload an ISO image to the server by going in to to the Configuration section of the vSphere Client, and clicking on storage and then browse the datastore. What I did was make a directory for the ISO Images, and then you can click the upload button and find the file on the local machine and it will upload it to the server. It makes it a lot faster to install from an ISO image vs the CDRom).

2. Once the OS is installed, I put the latest Security/Recommended patches on it. I also installed the VMWare Tools.

3. Do any “configuration” that you want to be done for all the VM’s. For example, modify the /etc/issue,/etc/ssh/sshd_config, create non root accounts, enable auditing, disable services, etc.

4. The next thing I did was ran a “sys-unconfig”. This will remove the root user’s password, clear the hostname, clear all IP information and the naming service info. It will leave other local created accounts though.

5. The final step of the sys-unconfig, halts the VM. This will be the “last” time you will boot this image. We will now use it as a poor man’s template for our other VM’s. (The reason I say last is unless you are going to update it to be used to “clone” new vm’s, you should never boot it again.) You should also probably rename this virtual machine to be something like “Solaris – Template – DNB” (DNB=Do Not Boot… )

6. Back in the Datastore browser, create a new folder for the to be “cloned” vm.

7. Now go in to the folder of the original vm you made that is in the “unconfiged” state. Once in there, select ALL the files in there and right click and select copy.

8. Now go to the newly created folder, and go in to it and right click and select paste. For a VM with a 20gb disk this takes about a minute or so to copy and paste.

9. Now go in to the cloned directory and right click on the VMX file and select “Add to Inventory”. It will pop up a dialog box and will let you “name” the new vm. Type in the new name of the new vm. (It won’t change the name of the files in that directory though.)

10. Next you can power on the new “cloned” vm. It will give you a pop up box asking if you have “moved” it or “copied” it or something else. Just select copied, and it will load the VM.

11. Now when Solaris boots, it will look like a clean machine, it will ask you for the hostname, ip, name service, etc, and then reboot after you enter in the information.

All said I did about 12 of these and had them all running at the same time and didn’t have a problem with them. If you need some different “hardware” for a vm, before you power it on, you can change the settings just as if you had installed it from scratch. One thing with the new vSphere it will support adding more than just a disk if the OS supports it. So you should be able to add processors, disk and possibly memory on the fly to a solaris VM.

Hope that helps people with the i version of ESX…