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vCheck Daily Report for vSphere

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Join the VMware Code and #vCheck channel on slack and ask questions here!

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Navigation
About
Features
Installing
Enhancements
Contributing
Plugins
Styles
Jobs & Settings
More Info

About

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vCheck is a PowerShell HTML framework script, the script is designed to run as a scheduled task before you get into the office to present you with key information via an email directly to your inbox in a nice easily readable format.

This script picks on the key known issues and potential issues scripted as plugins for various technologies written as Powershell scripts and reports it all in one place so all you do in the morning is check your email.

One of they key things about this report is if there is no issue in a particular place you will not receive that section in the email, for example if there are no datastores with less than 5% free space (configurable) then the disk space section in the virtual infrastructure version of this script, it will not show in the email, this ensures that you have only the information you need in front of you when you get into the office.

This script is not to be confused with an Audit script, although the reporting framework can also be used for auditing scripts too. I don't want to remind you that you have 5 hosts and what there names are and how many CPUs they have each and every day as you don't want to read that kind of information unless you need it, this script will only tell you about problem areas with your infrastructure.

What is checked for in the vSphere version ?

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The following items are included as part of the vCheck vSphere download, they are included as vCheck Plugins and can be removed or altered very easily by editing the specific plugin file which contains the data. vCheck Plugins are found under the Plugins folder.

  • General Details
  • Number of Hosts
  • Number of VMs
  • Number of Templates
  • Number of Clusters
  • Number of Datastores
  • Number of Active VMs
  • Number of Inactive VMs
  • Number of DRS Migrations for the last days
  • Snapshots over x Days old
  • Datastores with less than x% free space
  • VMs created over the last x days
  • VMs removed over the last x days
  • VMs with No Tools
  • VMs with CD-Roms connected
  • VMs with Floppy Drives Connected
  • VMs with CPU ready over x%
  • VMs with over x amount of vCPUs
  • List of DRS Migrations
  • Hosts in Maintenance Mode
  • Hosts in disconnected state
  • NTP Server check for a given NTP Name
  • NTP Service check
  • vmkernel warning messages ov the last x days
  • VC Error Events over the last x days
  • VC Windows Event Log Errors for the last x days with VMware in the details
  • VC VMware Service details
  • VMs stored on datastores attached to only one host
  • VM active alerts
  • Cluster Active Alerts
  • If HA Cluster is set to use host datastore for swapfile, check the host has a swapfile location set
  • Host active Alerts
  • Dead SCSI Luns
  • VMs with over x amount of vCPUs
  • vSphere check: Slot Sizes
  • vSphere check: Outdated VM Hardware (Less than V7)
  • VMs in Inconsistent folders (the name of the folder is not the same as the name)
  • VMs with high CPU usage
  • Guest disk size check
  • Host over committing memory check
  • VM Swap and Ballooning
  • ESXi hosts without Lockdown enabled
  • ESXi hosts with unsupported mode enabled
  • General Capacity information based on CPU/MEM usage of the VMs
  • vSwitch free ports
  • Disk over commit check
  • Host configuration issues
  • VCB Garbage (left snapshots)
  • HA VM restarts and resets
  • Inaccessible VMs
  • Much, Much more.......

Installing

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Copy the vCheck files to the desired location. Run the script 'vCheck.ps1' -Config to do initial configuration of the script.

Enhancements

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  • Unit Testing / CI - We are working on full support for Pester tests, which will help automate code validation. We will start small and work to provide as much documentation as we can to help with integration.

  • Module Support - We are looking at our options to convert some, or all of the plugins to PowerShell modules. This will make things much easier to version and track, individually. Additionally, if we convert vCheck, itself, to a module, we open our options to support publishing to the PowerShell Gallery, or at least providing users and organizations a standard platform to distribute it. Again, these options are currently under review.

  • Settings GUI - A settings GUI would be a basic form that would allow a user to view/set/change current vCheck configuration settings, without the complexity of settings values from within a file. This initiative is currently in development.

In the meantime, don't hesitate to pop over to the #vCheck channel on slack and join in on active conversations about anything you see- or don't see- here!

Contributing

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See out Contributions guidelines

Plugins

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Plugin Structure

This section describes the basic structure of a vCheck plugin so that you can write your own plugins for either private use, or to contribute to the vCheck project.

Settings

Your plugin must contain a section for settings. This may be blank, or may contain one or more variables that must be defined for your plugin to determine how it operates.

Examples

No Settings

# Start of Settings   
# End of Settings

Settings to define two variables

# Start of Settings   
# Comment - presented as part of the setup wizard   
$variable = "value"     
# Second variable     
$variable2 = "value2"     
...     
# End of Settings

Required variables

Each plugin must define the following variables: $Title - The display name of the plugin $Header - the header of the plugin in the report $Display - The format of the plugin (See Content section) $Author - The author's name $PluginVersion - Version of the plugin $PluginCategory - The Category of the plugin

Content

Report output

Anything that is written to stdout is included in the report. This should be either an object or hashtable in order to generate the report information.

$Display variable

  • List
  • Table
  • Chart - Not currently merged to master

Plugin Template

# Start of Settings
# End of Settings

# generate your report content here. Simple placeholder hashtable for the sake of example
@{"Plugin"="Awesome"}

$Title = "Plugin Template"
$Header =  "Plugin Template"
$Comments = "Comment about this awesome plugin"
$Display = "List"
$Author = "Plugin Author"
$PluginVersion = 1.0
$PluginCategory = "vSphere"

Table Formatting

Since v6.16, vCheck has supported Table formatting rules in plugins. This allows you to define a set of rules for data, in order to provide more richly formatted HTML reports.

Using Formatting Rules

To use formatting rules, a $TableFormat variable must be defined in the module.

The $TableFormat variable is a Hastable, with the key being the "column" of the table that the rule should apply to.

The Value of the Hashtable is an array of rule. Each rule is a hashtable, with the Key being the expression to evaluate, and the value containing the formatting options.

Formatting options

The Formatting options are made up of two comma-separated values:

  1. The scope of the formatting rule - "Row" to apply to the entire row, or "Cell" to only apply to that particular cell.
  2. A pipe-separated HTML attribute, and value. E.g. class|green to apply the "green" class to the HTML element specified in number 1.

Examples

Example 1

Assume you have a CSS class named "green", which you want to apply to any compliant objects. Similarly, you have a "red" class that you wish to use to highlight non-compliant objects. We would define the formatting rules as follows:

$TableFormat = @{"Compliant" = @(@{ "-eq $true" = "Cell,class|green"; }, @{ "-eq$false" = "Cell,class|red" })}

Here we can see two rules; the first checks if the value in the Compliant column is equal to $true, in which case it applies the "green" class to the table cell (i.e. element). The second rule applies when the compliant column is equal to $false, and applied the "red" class.

Example 2

Suppose you now want to run a report on Datastores. You wish to highlight datastores with less than 25% free space as "warning", those with free space less than 15% as "critical". To make them stand out more, you want to highlight the entire row on the report. You also wish to highlight datastores with a capacity less than 500GB as silver.

To achieve this, you could use the following:

$TableFormat = @{"PercentFree" = @(@{ "-le 25" = "Row,class|warning"; }, @{ "-le 15" = "Row,class|critical" }); "CapacityGB" = @(@{ "-lt 500" = "Cell,style|background-color: silver"})}

Here we see the rules that apply to two different columns, with rules applied to the values in a fashion similar to Example 1.

Styles

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Each style must implement a function named Get-ReportHTML, as this is what is called by vCheck to generate the HTML report.

An array of plugin results is passed to Get-ReportHTML, which contains the following properties:

  • Title
  • Author
  • Version
  • Details
  • Display
  • TableFormat
  • Header
  • Comments
  • TimeToRun

Additionally, if the style is to define colours to be used by charts, the following variables need to be defined:

  • [string[]] $ChartColours - Array containing HTML colours without the hash e.g. $ChartColours = @("377C2B", "0A77BA", "1D6325", "89CBE1")
  • [string] $ChartBackground - HTML colour without the hash. e.g. "FFFFFF"
  • [string] $ChartSize - YYYxZZZ formatted string - where YYY is horizontal size, and ZZZ is height. E.g. "200x200"

To include image resources, you may call Add-ReportResource, specifying CID and data. As these are not referenced by table formatting rules, this will need to be called with the -Used $true parameter.

Jobs & Settings

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Job XML Specifications

In order to use the -Job parameter, an XML configuration file is used.

The root element is <vCheck>, under this there are two elements:

  • <globalVariables> element specifies the path to the file containing the vCheck settings (by default globalVariables.ps1)
  • <plugins> element has a semi-colon separated attribute name path, which contains the path(s) to search for plugins contained in child <plugin> elements.

Each <plugin> element contains the plugin name.

Config Example

<vCheck>
  <globalVariables>GlobalVariables.ps1</globalVariables>
  <plugins path="plugins-vSphere">
     <plugin>00 Connection Plugin for vCenter.ps1</plugin>
     <plugin>03 Datastore Information.ps1</plugin>
     <plugin>11 VMs with over CPU Count LOL WRONG PATH.ps1</plugin>
     <plugin>99 VeryLastPlugin Used to Disconnect.ps1</plugin>
  </plugins>
</vCheck>

Export/Import Settings

This section describes how to import and export your vCheck settings between builds.

These functions were added to vCheckUtils.ps1 in June '14 (first release build TBD)

You can copy a newer version of vCheckUtils.ps1 to your existing build in order to use the new functions.

To utilize the new functions, simply dot source the vCheckUtils.ps1 file in a PowerShell console:

PS E:\scripts\vCheck-vSphere> . .\vCheckUtils.ps1

This should load and list the functions available to you. We will be focusing on Export-vCheckSettings and Import-vCheckSettings. If you do not see these listed, you will need a newer version of vCheckUtils.ps1.

Example

Lets assume we have an existing build located at E:\Scripts\vCheck-vSphere

First lets rename the folder E:\Scripts\vCheck-vSphere-old

Now we can download the latest build, unblock the zip file and unpack to E:\Scripts leaving us with two builds in our Scripts directory - vCheck-vSphere-old and vCheck-vSphere

Next we'll export the settings from the old build - using PowerShell navigate to E:\Scripts\vCheck-vSphere-old and dot source vCheckUtils.ps1

Export Settings

Running Export-vCheckSettings will by default create a CSV file named vCheckSettings.csv in the current directory. You can also specify a settings file

PS E:\scripts\vCheck-vSphere-old> Export-vCheckSettings -outfile E:\MyvCheckSettings.csv

That's all there is to exporting your vCheck settings. Note that the settings file will be overwritten if you were to run the function again.

Import Settings

To import your vCheck settings, in PowerShell navigate to the new build at E:\Scripts\vCheck-vSphere and dot source vCheckUtils.ps1 once again.

Here we have two options - if we run Import-vCheckSettings with no parameters it will expect the vCheckSettings.csv file to be in the same directory. If not found it will prompt for the full path to the settings CSV file. The second option is to specify the path to the settings CSV file when running Import-vCheckSettings

PS E:\scripts\vCheck-vSphere> Import-vCheckSettings -csvfile E:\MyvCheckSettings.csv

If new settings or plugins have been added to the new build you will be asked to answer the questions, similar to running the initial config. During the import, the initial config is disabled, so once the import is complete you are ready to run your new build.

More Info

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For more information please read here: http://www.virtu-al.net/vcheck-pluginsheaders/vcheck/

For an example vSphere output (doesnt contain all info) click here http://virtu-al.net/Downloads/vCheck/vCheck.htm