Tip of the Week: Using VMware Interface

 Hi, my name is Matt Moore and I’m the Director of Development here at Rove.

My first blog post will be a quick run down of a common Mobile Admin use-case involving Mobile Admin’s VMware interface.  

So I’m out to dinner with my family and I get a call from a high priority user complaining of a system outage.  I’m confident his issue is related to a virtual machine in my vSphere deployment.

There is not much I can do since I’m away from my desk or laptop, but in the meantime I’d like to be able to triage this situation and get notified if this issue escalates.

Here is how I accomplish this with Mobile Admin and my trusty iPhone.

At this point I have connected to my Mobile Admin server from my iOS Mobile Admin client and opened Mobile Admin’s VMware interface.

I see a list of my  ESX servers, virtual machines, data centers and resource pools much like I’d see if I was at my desk. Keep in mind that Mobile Admin can connect to vSphere servers or directly to ESX servers.

Suppose the virtual machine that I think is the source of the problem is ‘Rove-c45.’  I can clearly see that this vm is in a suspended state...

 First thing I need to do is get the virtual machine running again for my high priority user.  I select the ‘Rove-c45’ vm.

 

  Hit the menu button...

And power on the vm.

Once I confirm the power on command completed successfully I can leave a note in the vm’s settings page to let others know of the issue.

Now I need to find out why this machine went into a suspended state.

First I need to check the event log for this machine.  To do this I select Events from the menu.

Viewing the event log entries I see the machine powered on a few weeks ago, a reminder to install VMware tools and then the machine entering a suspended state.  There’s not much to go on here so I’ll need to find the root cause when I get back to my desk.

In the meantime I need to keep this vm up and running for my user so I’d like to be informed immediately if this machine goes into a suspended state. 

This is achieved via Mobile Admin’s Notifications feature.

Check out our blog next week for more tips on using the Notifications Feature.

Matt Moore