Tag Archives: Tags

Using tags for something interesting

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Hello all

Thought I would try and share a bit of what I have been working on internally for a while now. As we are an organization that is still does not have all processes and data management in place I have been working on rewriting an Python based page I hacked together with a colleague to list information about initially virtual machines but it grew to include DNS, physical machines, NAT relations as well as relying on ARP data to resolve MAC to IP where needed. I finished version 1.0 of this new system written in Django 1.10 a few weeks back and am already working on a 1.1 release with a few feature requests.

Now the system grew out of a need to identify people and relations around virtual machines in our infrastructure and today heavily relies on Tags in the web client. We were already using tags to include VM’s in backup jobs in Veeam (something I can highly recommend doing!).

So what and how do we do it? We use 5 tag categories with the names Owner, Department, SysAdm, AppAdm and Service. These 5 tag types give a lot of information directly on the VM on who to contact and what service the VM belongs to. This information is then on a daily basis exported to the new system in the form of a CSV file at the moment. This CSV file along with a file from our NAT device, on from the datacenter routers with ARP, a list of DNS records, a CSV file from our Racktables installation for physical machines where the 5 tag categories are also defined and a list of systems with the SCOM agent installed.

The data is then imported into a data model defined in Django’s Object-relational mapping that tries to correlate some of the information from the different files. The end result is a web page where all systems and DNS records in theory are listed and can be searched, filtered, sorted etc. Where one can find a system(physical or virtual) based on the IP, DNS record (A, CNAME or MX), name, type, OS, you name it. This has some of the characteristics of a CMDB or CMS but instead of showing what it should be it is showing what it actually is at the time of the latest export. We have used this to help ourselves in the Infrastructure department as well as allowing some supports to find information to help route incidents and service requests to the correct groups in our service management system.

Below I have included a blurred screenshot from the system to show one of the views defined. A cut out from a simple system list. Note that the last 5 columns are the tag categories from vSphere/Racktables with the danish names we chose for them.

So that is an example of how we use tags in our day to day operations. We still in some cases miss the old Custom attributes (I know they are still in the API but not exposed in the web client) with the option of inputting variable information like expiry dates etc. Having to do something like that with tags would in my opinion be a mess (imagine a tag for every single date of expiry).

A bonus of doing this you can actually correlate this information with information from vRops via e.g PowerCLI. As an example one could send an email based on an alert in vRops to the addresses set via the SysAdm tags.

PowerCLI: Datastore Cluster and Tags

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I was trying to help out a colleague yesterday when I realized that a quick fix to the problem would be to tag the datastore clusters in our environment and get them based on these tags instead of trying to determine which datastore cluster to choose when deploying a VM from PowerCLI.

So I decided to do this quickly and will show what I did (code snippets are from my vSphere 6.0 lab but the it is the same on our 5.5 production).

New-TagCategory -Name "CDC" -Cardinality Single -EntityType DatastoreCluster
New-Tag -Name "DC2" -Category CDC
Get-DatastoreCluster DatastoreCluster | New-TagAssignment -Tag "DC2"

Now I hope we can agree that I have created a new TagCategory that applies to Datastore Clusters and allows for one tag per object. We have also created a tag in this category called “DC2”. Lastly we have added the tag to the datastore cluster “DatastoreCluster”. Now if I run the following I get what I would expect:

C:\> Get-DatastoreCluster DatastoreCluster | Get-TagAssignment

Tag                                      Entity
---                                      ------
CDC/DC2                                  DatastoreCluster
C:\>

But if I run this I get something that I did not expect

C:\> Get-DatastoreCluster -Tag "DC2"
C:\>

This means that it is not working the same as for Virtual Machines with the “get-vm” cmdlet:

C:\> New-TagCategory -Name "VMTest" -Cardinality Single -EntityType VirtualMachine
Name                                     Cardinality Description
----                                     ----------- -----------
VMTest                                   Single
C:\> New-Tag -Name "Test" -Category "VMTest"
Name                           Category                       Description
----                           --------                       -----------
Test                           VMTest
C:\> Get-VM testvm01 | New-TagAssignment Test
Tag                                      Entity
---                                      ------
VMTest/Test                              testvm01
C:\> get-vm | Get-TagAssignment
Tag                                      Entity
---                                      ------
VMTest/Test                              testvm01
C:\> get-vm -Tag "Test"
Name                 PowerState Num CPUs MemoryGB
----                 ---------- -------- --------
testvm01             PoweredOff 1        4,000

So I do not know if this is the way it was meant to work but I is definitely not what I expected!

Working with Tags

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

The last couple of days I have been working with PowerCLI and vCenter Tags to see if I could automate my way out of some things regarding tracking which sys admins are responsible for a given VM.

Tagging and creating tags manually is not really my cup of tea (we have 1000+ vms and 40+ sys admins and even more people beyond that who could be tagged. So some automation would be required.

Next pre-creating all tags was not something I would enjoy either as maintaining the list would suck in my opinion. Also all tags are vCenter local so if you like us have more than 1 vCenter then propagating Tags to other vCenters is also something to keep in mind.

I added a bunch of small functions to my script collection to fix somethings. The first thing I ran into was “How to find which vCenter a given VM object came from?”. Luckily the “-Server” option on most commands accepts the vCenter server name as a string and not just the connection object so the following will get the vCenter of a given object by splitting the Uid attribute:

$object.Uid.Split("@")[1].Split(":")[0]

Splitting at “@” and taking the second part will remove the initial part of the string so it now starts with the FQDN followed by more information. Then splitting at the “:” just before port number and taking the first part will result in the FQDN of the vCenter. This may not work in all cases but it works for our purpose.

Now I needed this in my script because I was running into the problem of finding the correct Tag object to use with a given VM object in the “New-TagAssignment” Cmdlet. However it dawned on me that if I just make sure that the tag is present on all vCenter servers when I call “New-TagAssignment” I don’t need the Tag object just the name and PowerCLI/vCenter will do it’s magic. Thus the following works perfectly:

$VM | New-TagAssignment "<TAGNAME>"

But in any case I now have a way of finding the vCenter name of a given vSphere object in PowerCLI 🙂