Today, we’re going to talk about our beloved friend, the CD-ROM. I remember the days of loading up the CD caddy to play the 7th guest and any number of Sierra titles… Err I mean to use Encarta for research, obviously! And although many of today’s systems ship without any removable media, the CD/DVD is still a big part of our lives. When you download a new OS, you’re most likely going to download it as an ISO file that you’ll either load on to a USB stick or open directly on your PC. These ISO images still use the ISO filesystem even though 90% of the time they’re loaded onto media that isn’t round. Yet ISO remains the standard for image files.
When you spin up a Virtual Machine, most likely you’re loading the OS via an ISO file, and when you load VMware Tools, those also use an ISO file. Have you ever built a virtual machine and left the ISO mounted? It’s okay, we all have! What happens when you try to vMotion a VM with an ISO mounted? If the ISO isn’t available on the destination host, it fails! This becomes a problem when you want to leverage DRS or the AWESOME power of vRealize Operations Manager Workload Balance feature. If there’s a reason for the ISO to be mounted then that’s one thing, but if there isn’t then it’s just downright bad virtual etiquette.
We use vROps to tell us all sorts of things about our environments, so could we use it to tell us what VM’s have ISOs mounted? SURE!!
First, we’ll need to create a view. Open up the Dashboards menu on the top, pick Views from the left-hand menu, and click the green plus sign.
Give your view a cool name and description.
Next, expand the Presentation menu and select List.
We’ll configure this list to show us the name of the virtual machine as well as the operating system. Open up the Subjects menu and select vCenter Adapter -> Virtual Machine from the drop-down menu.
Open the Data menu and change the dropdown from Metrics to Properties. Then type “Operating” in the search box to find the Operating System properties.
Expand Summary, Guest Operating System, and drag Guest OS Full Name into the Data window. Repeat this for any other information you want to show up in the list.
You can change your preview source at the top to display real data to test our view. In this case, I chose the vSphere World and the list populated all of my VM names and their operating systems!
It works!
As cool as that is, however, we don’t need a full list of all our VM’s right now. Instead, we only want to return the VM’s that have CD-ROM’s mounted. No problem! Select the Filter tab.
Change the dropdown from Metrics to Properties, type CD-ROM in the search field, and hit enter.
This will narrow down all of our VM’s properties to one. Expand Configuration, Security, and select Disconnect CD-ROM.
Now, complete the filter query by selecting is false.
Validate your query by refreshing your preview.
Once you’re happy with the results, save the view so you can add it to a report or dashboard!
Hello Matt, thanks for your post on vRealize ! Very well exposed !
A have a question, for this step > “This will narrow down all of our VM’s properties to one. Expand Configuration, Security, and select Disconnect CD-ROM.
” i can’t see this specific metric …. It’s a problem with my Policy in the vRealize ? One idea ?
Hi Chem,
What version of vROps are you running? Also, make sure you’re searching under properties and not metrics.
Hi Matt, thanks for your reply. It’s resolved. The specific policy (security) must be actived before create the symptoms and the alert definition. In Policy > Configuration > Security > Disconnect CD-ROM 🙂
Hi Matt is it also also possible to do a similar report for attached usb devices? These are even more of a pain in our environment especially when we want to patch the hosts