ZAbbix 1.8.3 VMware Appliance

[stevenbryen]

The VMware Files do not work when importing into VMWare vSphere environment. I am not sure what the authoring zabbix environment is, but I managed to get the VM running in VMware Workstation.

I tried converting directly into vSphere using VMware Converter, however this was only seeing a thick provisioned 60GB HDD. Then the conversion would not complete with an unkown error.

THe only way I could sucessfully get the VM into VMware vSphere ESX environment was to convert out of Workstation to OVF Format (Virtual Appliance), and then deploy a VM from OVF template in the vSphere client to the ESX using the OVF file that was created. However this still had the following issues.

- Only eth0 had a config file in /etc/sysconfig/network/ and the virtual network interface was being presented as eth2.

To resolve this I had to copy the ifcfg-eth0 file to a new file called ifcfg-eth2 for this to work correctly and remove the eth0 config file to stop if from erroring on a network service restart.

I would suggest that future versions of Zabbix be created in he OVF form so that they can be imported into all of VMwares products.

Has anybody else seen this issues? Or have a better solution please let me know.

Steve

[stevenbryen]

Also to Add...

Onve the VM was in the vSphere ESX Environment and running it was showing with a 60GB thick provisioned disk. I had to clone this VM to a new VM, and select for the destination Disk to be thin provisioned. This took quite a while to complete.

THe best solution is for the Zabbix VM to be created on a vSphere environment with thin disks and then converted to an OVF Format. This way the deployment will be pretty quick on all VMware Hypervisor Products.

[richlv]

- Only eth0 had a config file in /etc/sysconfig/network/ and the virtual network interface was being presented as eth2.

To resolve this I had to copy the ifcfg-eth0 file to a new file called ifcfg-eth2 for this to work correctly and remove the eth0 config file to stop if from erroring on a network service restart.

you could also try changing interface name in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

I would suggest that future versions of Zabbix be created in he OVF form so that they can be imported into all of VMwares products.

the appliance images are being built with suse studio, and they currently support vmx (vmware + virtualbox), iso, hdd/flash image and xen image. ovf is not supported currently. of course, if support for ovf would be added in future, zabbix virtual appliance would be distributed in that format as well.

[DenW]

VA's..

Hi,

Just thought i'd let you all know that the virtual appliances offerings... well.. suck..

Sorry to be blunt about it, but i've spent hours over the past few days getting any of them to work inside my XenServer 5.6 setup, but to no avail.
The only one that did do something was the live CD, but as this does not let you install to harddrive this is pretty useless..
The bit of Zabbix that I saw however appealed to me, looked quite good, and would have loved to play around with it some more. But not with a live-CD setup where changes are lost on reboot.

VMWare image: XenConvert could not import the .vmdk into XenServer.
Xen Guest: can not be imported into XenServer, does not recognize the format.
USB\HD image: raw-format?? This should be something like .img for it to be burned to USB.

Also, what's with the tar.gz formats.. everything i used in windows got me unpacked filesizes that were off.. (up to 60GB! at one point), or just plain unreadable tar-files. Even Cygwin's TAR did not do very well..

Virtual Appliances are generally made available to make it easy for people to set up (and try) software. Well.. maybe you should take a Windows box and try for yourself what you are offering before other people spend their time on getting this to work.
Comparing the level of detail of Zabbix and the VA's there's a pretty wide gap in attention that has been given.

And i agree completely with the previous poster. OVF would be the way to go...

Very disappointed at the moment, hope you can correct the VA's so they do work with a lot less effort..

Thanks for listening..
DenW

[badener]

no problem importing into ESX

just thought I might try importing the VM into our ESX cluster - no problem
I used the vCenter Converter Standalone 4.3.0 Version-292238 and our ESX are 4.1
as source I selected VMware workstation virtual machine
I also did a second test importing and converting the disk from flat to thin which also worked
I also would recommend using 7-zip on windows, on my box I've never had problems unzipping tar.gz files with it

[richlv]

Just thought i'd let you all know that the virtual appliances offerings... well.. suck..

um... fortunately, seems to be a not-that-common experience

Sorry to be blunt about it, but i've spent hours over the past few days getting any of them to work inside my XenServer 5.6 setup, but to no avail.
The only one that did do something was the live CD, but as this does not let you install to harddrive this is pretty useless..

VMWare image: XenConvert could not import the .vmdk into XenServer.

as noted before, appliance images are generated by suse studio. so this is either a problem with suse studio, xenconvert or usage of it. given that vmdks themselves are ok, it's one of the latter two.

Xen Guest: can not be imported into XenServer, does not recognize the format.

again, should just work. what exactly did you try to import, which xenserver version ?

USB\HD image: raw-format?? This should be something like .img for it to be burned to USB.

what's the difference between raw and img in this case ?

Also, what's with the tar.gz formats.. everything i used in windows got me unpacked filesizes that were off.. (up to 60GB! at one point), or just plain unreadable tar-files. Even Cygwin's TAR did not do very well..

tar.gz, despite some of its shortcomings, is one of, if not the, most popular archive formats. as noted before, on windows 7-zip (gpl) might be a good choice for working with this format.
as for 60gb files, that might be disk image, thus size would be correct and expected.
as for unreadable tarfiles - well, they are not supposed to be human readable after all - or was that referring to some other problem ?
as for "cygwin's tar" - not sure what that exactly is - isn't it just any unix-like tar (like gnu tar) running under cygwin environment ? if so, i don't see how that tar could have any problems with a tarfile, especially if gz uncompressed successfully. of course, if gz uncompressing was failing (maybe because of a corrupted download), that would not work.

we could also try to figure out why some operating system does not support old and widely used compression/archiving format out of the box, but that would be a bit of an offtopic

Virtual Appliances are generally made available to make it easy for people to set up (and try) software. Well.. maybe you should take a Windows box and try for yourself what you are offering before other people spend their time on getting this to work.

i've personally seen people get zabbix virtual appliance running from/on windows in minutes, lots of times - using various vmware and virtualbox products. common problems i've heard about include corrupted downloads and incorrect usage of image converters (usually the case with vmware enterprise offerings, where using the correct converter solves the problem).

And i agree completely with the previous poster. OVF would be the way to go...

as noted, the images are prepared by suse studio - if it will support ovf, i'm sure zabbix virtual appliance would appear in that format as well. of course, it would not help with possibly corrupted downloads or incorrect archive uncompressing process, which currently are at the top of my suspected problem causes.

[richlv]

I would suggest that future versions of Zabbix be created in he OVF form so that they can be imported into all of VMwares products.

hey, it looks like suse studio has added ovf support - so it is possible the next version of zabbix virtual appliance will have ovf package as well

[24pm]

Zabbix on ESXi

Is it possible to run Zabbix vmdk package on ESXi 4.1?

I've got an error, while runing VM:

Module DevicePowerOn power on failed. 
Unable to create virtual SCSI device for scsi0:0, '/vmfs/volumes/4b9f6a06-c3eaacfe-25cd-001517cebf85/Zabbix_x86.i686-1.8.3/Zabbix_x86.i686-1.8.3.vmdk' 
Failed to open disk scsi0:0: Unsupported or invalid disk type 7. Make sure that the disk has been imported.

How to import the disk?

LiveCD works fine, but that's not enough.

[aprudnev]

Yes, I can confirm - I activated this by VMware Server2 (which I maintain just for such purposes of converting strange VM formats) and then I exported it as VA and imported into the ESXi without any problems. I can't say that it took too long, but many people will not be able to install this VA at all. Should use Virtual Appliance format, have database installed with '1 file per table' (it was not) and dom modules installed to allow 'export/import'.

The VMware Files do not work when importing into VMWare vSphere environment. I am not sure what the authoring zabbix environment is, but I managed to get the VM running in VMware Workstation.

I tried converting directly into vSphere using VMware Converter, however this was only seeing a thick provisioned 60GB HDD. Then the conversion would not complete with an unkown error.

THe only way I could sucessfully get the VM into VMware vSphere ESX environment was to convert out of Workstation to OVF Format (Virtual Appliance), and then deploy a VM from OVF template in the vSphere client to the ESX using the OVF file that was created. However this still had the following issues.

- Only eth0 had a config file in /etc/sysconfig/network/ and the virtual network interface was being presented as eth2.

To resolve this I had to copy the ifcfg-eth0 file to a new file called ifcfg-eth2 for this to work correctly and remove the eth0 config file to stop if from erroring on a network service restart.

I would suggest that future versions of Zabbix be created in he OVF form so that they can be imported into all of VMwares products.

Has anybody else seen this issues? Or have a better solution please let me know.

Steve

[Ryan]

ESXi 4.1

I experienced the same issue as Steve did and got it to work on ESXi 4.1 using the same steps. The only exception is I renamed eth0 to eth2.

I'm new to Zabbix and Linux in general. I look forward to learning and hopefully will continue to use and contribute for a long time.

Since Zabbix doesn't include an ESXi virtual appliance and to save testers time I want to make my working Zabbix EXi VM available for download but don't know if Zabbix would have any issue with that.

Moderator - Please advise.

Thanks,
Ryan

[richlv]

Since Zabbix doesn't include an ESXi virtual appliance and to save testers time I want to make my working Zabbix EXi VM available for download but don't know if Zabbix would have any issue with that.

well, zabbix is gpl, appliance os should be opensource as well - so you should be free to modify it and release under appropriate licence without asking anybody
the only things that would probably be relevant - not misrepresenting it as the official version etc etc

edit : oh, it might also be useful to try that with latest appliance rc - http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19868

[Ryan]

Download

Been busy but is the download as promised. It includes Zabbix 1.8.3. When I get a chance I will create one for the new version.

Happy Holidays

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7484243/Zabbix1.8.3.7z

[gavind]

Thanks Ryan, I was actually looking to test this out. The link still works.

[ghiaccio]

7z?
And what is that, an archive like zip/rar?
How do I get it open?

[tchjts1]

7z?
And what is that, an archive like zip/rar?
How do I get it open?

Use 7zip: http://www.7-zip.org/