Linux Scripting and VMware.

[thejackalhas1]

Hello all:

I am a Linux scripting newbie and I am hoping that someone can point me in the right direction.

I am currently testing in an VMware virtual environment using SUSE v. 11 and I am trying to write a script that will login to 1000 virtual machines and do the following:

1) kick off benchmark tools installed in the the vm's.

2) record the output of these bennchmark tools like CPU, memory, storage and networking.

I have no idea where to begin. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

John

[Irithori]

1) First I would ask some questions about this idea.
The purpose seems to be to get benchmark results?
If yes: Be aware, that VMs will influence each other if they run on the same host.
It is a difference, if one VM is actively doing something or ten.
Especially IO will be starved quite fast.
But also other resources such as CPU, ram and network are shared.

If the host hardware differs (I dont think you will run 1000 VMs on one box).
then this needs to be considered also when comparing results.

2) If you deal with a number of machines in the hundreds or thousands, then you need a solid infrastructure.
So, if the answer to 1) is: Yes we want to have 1000 VMs, then the next step is to think about hardware, that can stand the expected load.
This of course depends on what you are trying to do.

With the hardware in place (and plugged in, and redundant and hardware/software inventory set up, and contracts dealt with, etc) ,
the next step is to think about VLANs, DNS, DHCP, central logging, filesystem setup, etc

Usually I would also list kickstarting aka quick deploy.
But as we are talking about VMs, there might be quicker ways such as cloning VMs.
Vmware can be scripted to do so as far as I know (But I have no hands on experience here)

3) With all that done and ready, THEN one can think of triggering 1000 benchmarks
My usual suggestion for automization is puppet
But while puppet will for sure be better than a quick script, I have a feeling that a look into the documentation of cluster tools might be helpful.

[thejackalhas1]

Thank you for getting back to me.

The environment that I am using is a large scale cloud environment that consists of 28 blade servers where the vm's will reside. As far as the creation of the vm's - it is done through Tivoli where I have created a templete in VMware and Tivoli will then create the number of vm's needed. The hardware and networking is in place and I have created 5 vm's to test the scripting.

Each vm will be assigned it's own static ip address during the creaton process.

Thank you,

John

[huaihaizi3]

It's easy to perform your task if you have set the public key authentication between two hosts!

config the script you want to run on the remote nodes:

#!/bin/bash

commandline1
commandline2
commandline3
......

On your localhost ,just get a list of the ip addr of all the nodes; then just do:

for ip in $(cat ip_list)
do
       ssh ${ip} "bash -s" < script_to_run
done