Accepted Solutions
You would probably run into the same issue with customField, if the information for whatever reason was not captured properly. You probably also know that its not a best practice to have your VMs have access to your management systems such as updating your virtual infrastructure, but if you're aware of that, then your workaround will probably do what you need.
Another idea is to have a custom script that can run on all your guests whether it be for Windows/Linux and have a common repository that all guestVMs can communicate to, say an NFS server. You can have it create a file that provides the status of the services you're interested in, then you can have an administrative VM that will parse these files and then update the customField for each corresponding VM. It's some work but you be able to accomplish the task without having each VM need access to the infrastructure.
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William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
VMware Tools does not provide this capability directly, but with VMware Tools installed, you can utilize VMware VIX which allows you to perform various operations directly against a guest such running a script or copying/uploading files directly onto the guest fileystem. You can easily write a script to check the status of a specific service whether this be on Linux/Windows and then take appropriate action if it has not started. This is done pretty easily with the pre-compiled vmrun binary that is included with VIX, take a look at the VMware documentation for examples and also here: http://engr.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/#vmware_vix
I do have to warn you, if you're using VIX 1.7 (released just a day ago) it probably will not install properly if you're using Linux without a gnome/kde type desktop environment. It looks like there is a bug with their installer but if you're using a graphical Linux system or using Windows you're fine. VIX 1.6.2 (previous release) works great on both Windows/Linux or on vMA.
=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
afaik, there is no other way. You'll need to have the credentials for each of the guest that you want to run this in, there are other method via the SDK since this is a guest operation and has nothing to do with managing the VM itself.
=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
You would probably run into the same issue with customField, if the information for whatever reason was not captured properly. You probably also know that its not a best practice to have your VMs have access to your management systems such as updating your virtual infrastructure, but if you're aware of that, then your workaround will probably do what you need.
Another idea is to have a custom script that can run on all your guests whether it be for Windows/Linux and have a common repository that all guestVMs can communicate to, say an NFS server. You can have it create a file that provides the status of the services you're interested in, then you can have an administrative VM that will parse these files and then update the customField for each corresponding VM. It's some work but you be able to accomplish the task without having each VM need access to the infrastructure.
=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".