Top 5 – Pure Storage Technical Blog Posts 2014

Today I thought it would be pretty cool to list out my favorite 5 technical blog posts that pertain to Pure Storage. These are posts that I use to show customers how to get things done without re-inventing the wheel. Big thanks to Barkz and Cody for all the hard work they put in this year. Looking forward to even more awesomeness this year.

SQL Server 2014 Prod/Dev with VMware PowerCLI and Pure Storage PowerShell Toolkit – Rob “Barkz” Barker

Enhanced UNMAP script using with PowerCLI and RESTful API – Cody Hosterman

VMware PowerCLI  and Pure Storage – Cody Hosterman
Check out the great script to set all the vSphere Best Practices for the Pure Storage Flash Array.

Pure Storage PowerShell Toolkit Enhancements – Rob “Barkz” Barker

PowerActions – The PowerCLI Plugin for the vSphere Web Client with UNMAP – Cody Hosterman

JO-Unicorn-Rainbow

Build IP Management Server with Ubuntu, GIT and Nmap

Have 25 Vlans in your lab and Storage, Servers, Switches and other equipment all over the place?

Build a good Ubuntu box

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If you need more help on this leave some comments. It is pretty straight forward.
Be sure to select openssh server as a role.
After you login:
Remember to
$sudo apt-get update
$sudo apt-get upgrade
#If you are adventurous
$sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Install VMware Tools (you ARE doing this in a VM right?)

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From your VI Client set the VMware tools install to start, this will insert the disk for VMware Tools, but unfortunately doesn’t automate the install.
$sudo -s
#apt-get install build-essential
#apt-get install
#apt-get install apache2
The last two steps might not be needed but I do them out of habit. They allow the VMware tools to build the Kernel modules needed for VMXNET drivers.#mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cd
#cp /mnt/cd/VMwareTools-8.6.0-425873.tar.gz
#tar xvzf /tmp/VMwareTools-8.6.0-425873.tar.gz
#cd vmware-tools-distrib
#./vmware-install.pl
Now Run through the install of VMware tools.#apt-get install nmap
#apt-get install gitweb
#exit
You want to do some of the next steps as your normal user not root.
$cd ~
$mkdir nmaps
$git init nmaps
$sudo vi /etc/gitweb.conf
Modify the project root var to match your path to you nmaps.
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Now restart apache.
$sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
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Ok great, the webpage will be up at http://yourhost/gitweb
Now to add your network information:
$nmap -sP 10.10.10.0/25 -oG /pathtoyour/nmapsdirectory/file.map
<update> The above command is to scan a subnet with pings then dump the output to a file.</update>

Nmap – great network scanner, the -sP sets it to “Ping” mode, you don’t need to crawl ports or anything so ping is fine, it will resolve the DNS if that is working.
my example:
$nmap -sP 172.10.0.0/16 -oG /home/lab-admin/nmaps/vlan10.map

For what it is worth a /16 network takes forever. If you know the usable ip’s are a way smaller subset you can specify a range.
$nmap -sP 172.10.0.1-100 -oG /home/lab-admin/nmaps/vlan10.map

Next on the first time you must add the file to the git repository
$cd nmaps
$git add /home/lab-admin/nmaps/vlan10.map
$git commit -m “My Network Maps”

Now we have some content on the gitweb page.

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Click tree to see the files you have added.
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Click on blob to see your IP’s in use.

Let’s automate it with crontab

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As you can see it is fairly easy to get rolling. Before you finish, run the nmap command for each subnet and git add each file to the repository.Now we will tell cron to run the nmap scans on a regular interval and git commit the changes.
$vi ip-scanscript.sh
In this file put each ip scan on its own line. As seen above. Save the changes and exit.
$chmod +x ip-scanscript.sh
$./ip-scanscript.sh
This will create all the files you want in one swoop.
$cd nmaps
$git add *
This will add all the new files in the nmaps directory to the git repository.Edit the script one more time.
$vi ip-scanscript.sh
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By adding the git commit line to the script you can now set this up to automatically run with cron.
$crontab -e
[note]I was having issues with the range line in the screenshot above. Still testing.
[2nd note] change the git commit line to include a ‘-a’ example:
git commit -a -m “My IP Lists”
If you need help with crontab this is where I go when I can’t remember.
http://www.adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/07/cron-every-5-minutes/
I set mine to run every 4 hours.Hope this is helpful, not much reason to buy a fancy product when this can be up and running so quickly.

More References:
http://gitref.org/basic/

Finding the Fusion OVFTool

The OVFtool is something I wished VMware Fusion had a while back and finally got a chance to use it the other day. I checked google and I found that it was located at:

/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/ovftool

As I looked for that path I was surprised it was not there. I upgraded from Fusion 2 to 3 to 3.1 and never recalled a chance or a place to add the OVFtool to my install. I could not find an independent download for the Mac OVFtool. I ended up re-installing the newest version of Fusion and I had to click “Advanced” during the install and turn on the OVFtool to install. Not sure if that is the best way, but that is how I got it to work. 🙂

Now that the path exists I was able to convert the OVF Appliance to be used on my Mac.

ovftool --help reveals a ton of options. To do a basic conversion though try this:


$mkdir /Users/username/Documents/Virtual Machines/ApplianceName
$/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/ovftool/ovftool ./Appliance.ovf /Users/username/Documents/Virtual Machines/ApplianceName

This will expand and convert the VM to be used with Fusion. Now just select open the VM in Fusion and play away.

Veeam Monitor Free

I love Free Stuff

I thought I would at least make a mention of this newly free product from Veeam. I use FastSCP all the time, and recommend it to people whenever I can. So this will hopefully be just as awesome.
At first the download was super slow. Now I am getting 1.11 MB/s. Much better.

Update:
Thanks to VeeamMeUp for recognizing the blog. Always happy to share software I like or might like.