Thursday 14 August 2008

Statelesx 1.1.0 Released!

Yes yes, hard to believe but we have had a great response from the initial release from people all over the globe, including some improvements that we thought should go in straight away!

In this release, we have added:

- hosts that contact the appliance via the python script now are placed into an "unregistered hosts" section, making it very easy to add them to clusters (ie no more typing in hostname and UUID)

- hosts that are defined in clusters can be configured via a single button click in the web UI, so no python script is needed on the host. Yes, that means you can now configure ESXi boxes. You still need VirtualCenter though, and it's obviously not a completely hands off process since you still need a single button click to initiate the configuration, but we're working on that.

- web interface now located at http://[IP.Address.of.Appliance]/

Credentials are the same as the initial release (root / root for console, statelesx / statelesx for web interface). The new md5 sum is:

98aaea31137048338a547a56dd2a65c2 statelesx-1.1.0-ovf.zip

The python script also has a minor update, now 2 parameters are sent across:

#!/usr/bin/python
import socket
import re
import sys
#Open esx.conf, read only
esxconf = open("/etc/vmware/esx.conf", "r")
#Define regular expressions
getName = re.compile("/adv/Misc/HostName.=.(.*)")
getUUID = re.compile ("/system/uuid.=.(.*)")
#Search esx.conf for matches
for line in esxconf.readlines():
    hostname = getName.findall(line)
    for name in hostname:
        name = name.strip('"')
    UUID = getUUID.findall(line)
    for uuid in UUID:
        uuid = uuid.strip('"')
#Close esx.conf
esxconf.close()
#Define statelesx server address, port and msg
host = sys.argv[1]
port = 1974
msg = name + ":" + uuid
#Open socket
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
#Connect socket
s.connect((host,port))
#Send msg
print "Sending " + msg
s.send(msg)
# Close socket
s.close()


We hope you enjoy this release, feel free to mail us with any feature requests / bug reports or leave them in comments section of this post!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Saw your little talk on this at the London UG meeting. looks like a great product. Does it have a feature of capturing a running cluster config for when you are expanding an existing cluster ( not nessesarily built with Statelesx ) ?

vinternals said...

Cheers Chris! We don't have the functionality currently, but will very likely work on it next. We're just trying to figure out if a client plugin to capture this info would be worth the effort, or whether to keep it all in our web interface. Stay tuned :-)

Anonymous said...

Very nice! Awesome tool. Thanks for adding the ESXi support.

Now for the suggestions... :)
It would be nice if the home page has some sort of status (like service: running, stopped, etc) and/or overview instead of just license agreement text.
Since striaght XML doesn't really please the documentation gods, it would also be nice to have a report tab that displayed this info in a more friendly format.
I also second the idea about capturing a current cluster config.

Thanks again,
Jerry

HvdS303 said...

Hi Guys,

I would like to test this appliance but do you have some instructions to start with? My VM workstation crashes when i was powering on this appliance. A quick readme would be nice;-)) Thanks in advantage.

Herman

virtualvelcro said...

This looks like a useful tool for the configuration of hosts to a VC server for an implementor such as myself for multiple clients. Is there a thought or plan to add storage not format(aka VMFS volumes using this tool too) add licensing and setting more advanced settings for the CPU affinity or masking, etc...

vinternals said...

Thanks for all the comments guys! We are working away on a new release, which include some more friendliness around the XML stuff and also add the service status (why didn't we think of that :D). We will definitely add more features in time, although not as fast as we'd like - damn day jobs keep getting in the way ;-)

Unknown said...

As I see where are no way to configure userworld swap because this operation requires reboot host (in our case - stateless host).
Without userworld swap ESXi cannot perform HA.

Anonymous said...

hallo, I am trying version 1.1 with esx 3.5 U3, and the script gives an error with python, I changed the path to reach the version 2.2 installed on esx 3.5 u3 but the script doesn't run, any suggestion ?
regards