ESX « Carlos' Corner

Simulating a more interesting environment with Vyatta and VMware ESXi - pt 2

In an earlier post I went through the process of coming up with a solution to be able to test an Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 migration using VMs. In order to simulate a multi-site AD environment I wanted to use Vyatta based routers to create my network infrastructure. In this post I’ll actually walk through the process of setting up the ESX and theinternal router. In the next post(s) I’ll go into configuring the DMZ and internet routers and firewalls. As a reminder the environment I want to set up will look like this…

In order to actually be able to implement this I first had to go configure the appropriate networking configuration on each of the ESXi hosts.

First I needed to create a virtual switch utilizing the NIC attached to the crossover cable. This is done by going to the “Configuration” tab for the ESX host within the vSphere Client.

Clicking the “Add Networking” option will walk one through the wizard to configure the new switch. I started by choosing “Virtual Machine” on the Connection Type Screen.

On the next page I choose to create a new virtual switch and pick the appropriate physical NIC that will be used to communicate with the other host. (If I had the capacity to put all the VMs one one host I could create the vSwitch without having to specify a network adapter)

Then I created an initial Port Group and specified a VLAN ID for it. In this case for the Remote Site (192.168.3.X/24) I’m specifying VLAN ID 23.

Once completed the new virtual switch should look similar to the one shown below.

Now that the vSwitch has been created, I can add port groups for the other networks: DMZ (192.168.254.X), Internet (10.0.0.X) and HQ(192.168.2.X). Each one of these should have a unique VLAN ID associated with it which is also used when these port groups get created on the second host.

Continue reading Simulating a more interesting environment with Vyatta and VMware ESXi – pt 2

Simulating a more interesting environment with Vyatta and VMware ESXi

[Part 2 of this series which involves the actual configuration of the Vyatta routers is now up here -crt]

At work we’ve recently made the decision to migrate to Exchange 2010 from Exchange 2003. While we do have an environment that we can use for some testing of the migration it doesn’t mimic our production environment closely enough for me to be comfortable using it as the sole test area. Given the changes in how Exchange 2010 (E2KX) works vs 2003 I wanted to be able to simulate multiple (2) Active Directory sites (i.e. subnets), a DMZ, and the “Internet” including some really simple firewalls.

I wanted to use virtual machines to go through this exercise so that I could take snapshots and repeat the various steps and/or variations of them if necessary. In order to do this I utilized the Vyatta Community Edition based routers to help create my virtual “enterprise” environment. I’ve talked about Vyatta before in this article. In this post I’ll talk a little about the process I went through to get to my final configuration (shown below). In subsequent articles I’ll go through the actual router and VMware configuration process.

The final environment as laid out on two interconnected servers

My lab environment at home consists of two Dell PowerEdge servers (one a PE2850, the other a 2950 each with 8Gigs of RAM). Both servers are running ESXi 4.0. Since the 2850 can’t run 64 bit VMs I was going to install the Exchange 2003 servers and Windows 2003 DCs on it. Then I’d install VMs running Server 2008R2 on the 2950 with Exchange 2010. Both servers are connected to my home network and since I was going to be using both I wanted to have some way for VMs on each host to be able to communicate with others without necessarily having all the traffic come across my home network. Since both Dells have multiple NICs I connected them with a crossover cable ending up with something like this:

Physical view of the network

In initially penciling out a plan for what I wanted to do I had nine VMs scattered across four subnets.

Isolated environment with multiple gateways per subnet

Considering my limited resources and my need to keep some other unrelated VMs up and running while I’m testing, I trimmed this down to 7 by combining the Domain Controllers and Exchange 2003 servers together in the HQ and Remote subnets.

Consolidating functions to reduce # of VMs

In further looking at this from a networking perspective, I was hit with the realization the initial configuration with two routers attached to the HQ and DMZ subnets would require me to manage routing on each individual VM in each of those subnets as well as on each of the routers. As an example one can look at the Exchange 2010 server in the HQ site/subnet.

Continue reading Simulating a more interesting environment with Vyatta and VMware ESXi

Nagios ESX3i Scripts and ESX4i

This is just an update, but the scripts I wrote for use with Nagios and ESX3i seem to work just fine with ESX4i (at least in my home lab environment using Dell Poweredge 2850s).

Creating Monitoring Items in Zabbix for Nagios plugins – part 1 (Log data)

One of the things I wanted to check in looking at Zabbix was how hard it would be to use the Nagios plugins I wrote/modified for monitoring ESX 3i in Zabbix.

It turns out that they are usable pretty much as is though there is a minor modification that needs to be made on how they accept/expect parameters. There are however a couple of ways to approach setting them up. Zabbix supports maintaining a couple of different kinds of data for external checks (as well as in general). These include:

Float
Integer
Text
Log
Character

The Nagios plugins I ‘m concerned in looking at will probably work with either the Log type or Integer. The external check “Item” type is just that a check. In and of itself it doesn’t make anything happen in terms of alerting or notifications. For that we need to set up “Triggers.” I’ll cover setting up an Item using Log type data in this post.

Continue reading Creating Monitoring Items in Zabbix for Nagios plugins – part 1 (Log data)

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Simulating a more interesting environment with Vyatta and VMware ESXi - pt 2

Simulating a more interesting environment with Vyatta and VMware ESXi

Nagios ESX3i Scripts and ESX4i

Creating Monitoring Items in Zabbix for Nagios plugins – part 1 (Log data)

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