Jase's Place

Well, Tripwire released another free tool today, OpsCheck.

Pretty nifty little java based application to check for inconsistencies between hosts and VM’s to make sure that a vMotion could occur from one host to another (or one of many).

I figured I’d fire it up, and see what gives.

When you go to perform an “Operational Check”, you have the choice to scan a single cluster, or scan up to 10 hosts in different clusters. I would imagine that if you have more than 10 hosts in a cluster you would be fine as well. At least that is what the documentation leads me to believe.

So I fired it up, and pointed it at cluster I use for some testing. I have some VM’s on this cluster, but not many.

Here is what I found after running a check:

Woo-Hoo! No host issues, and I only had 1 VM with an issue. So what was the issue?

A doggone attached CDROM. Well, that’s good to know.

Now, I will mention that all of the hosts in the cluster, are the same processor type, the networks are 100% identical at the host level, and yada yada yada.

So what happens if I run OpsCheck against all 8 of my hosts? I have 4 that are several year old IBM boxes, and I have 4 that are brand new HP boxes. Of course the processors are going to have VMotion issues.

Given that OpsCheck checks at both the VM and Host levels, here is something I have found…

If you have:

1. 1 or more newer hosts (newer architecture processor)
2. 1 or more older hosts (older architecture processor)
3. All have ESX/ESXi configured identically
4. The only difference is the actual CPUs used in the hosts
5. You know the CPUs are not compatible for VMotion purposes

You will see:

1. A VM on an old host will have an issue with all new hosts (1 or more issues listed, depending on how many incompatible hosts)
2. The opposite, A VM on a new host will have an issue with all old hosts (1 or more issues listed, again)

Here’s an example running it across 4 IBM x445 boxes, and 4 HP DL580 G5 boxes:

I’m not going to try to do the math… But with over 300 guests, across 8 hosts, you can see there are going to be some compatibility issues when half the hosts are old, and half the hosts are new.

Regardless, this is a really cool tool, and as I can see from the above graphic, I’ve got 14 VM’s to troubleshoot. That’s the last time I let someone else take point on the VMware environment.

Cheers.