System Monitoring - Cacti Virtual Appliance and Virtual Box

Cacti Virtual Appliance and Virtual Box
I wanted a fast and easy solution to do some monitoring on my network.  I have used mrtg and rddtool before, and it has served my needs in the past.  This time I wanted something that was move feature packed and robust.  Enter Cacti.  It didn’t seem too hard to set this up from scratch, but I really did not want to spend a lot of time messing around with it.  I found http://www.virtualappliances.net/ had a pre-built Cacti Virtual Appliance for VMware in OVF format (Note:  I just noticed on 8/16/2010 that this is not a valid site anymore - so the rest of this post is invalid unless you can find the VA-Cacti.ovf file).  Well Virtual Box can import the OVF format.   So here is what I did:

1.    Download the files from http://www.virtualappliances.net/downloads/esx/i386/VA-Cacti/
2.    Note…  when I downloaded the VA-Cacti.ovf file it wanted to save it with an xml extension.  I let it, and then once it was saved on my hard drive I changed the extension from xml to ovf.
3.    Open VirtualBox
4.    Select File and Import Appliance
5.    Click on Choose and navigate to the OVF File.  Select it and click next.
6.    Unselect/uncheck the NIC.  Click the import button.
7.    The VA-Cacti virtual machine should show up in your list.  Highlight it and click on Settings.
8.    Click System, uncheck floppy and cdrom
9.    Click Display, change Video Memory from 4 to 7.
10.    Click Network, Enable the Network Adapter.  I selected the Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop NIC and Selected Bridged Adapter.
11.    Click OK
12.    For whatever reason,  VM-ware tools is installed and messes up the /etc/fstab file.  Plus we don’t need or want vmware tools…  We are using Virtual Box.  There is probably a cleaner way to do this, but a quick and dirty way to overcome this issue is…
13.    Start the Appliance but push ESC right away.  Select the “recovery mode” option from the menu.
14.    The default root password is root.
15.    Enter it to get in to maintenance mode.
16.    Change directories to /etc
17.    Remove the vmware tools directory.
# rm -R vmware-tools
18.    Change directories to /etc/rc2.d
19.    Remove the S19vmware-tools startup/shutdown script
# rm S19vmware-tools
20.    reboot
21.    As the system is shutting down, you may get a warning about not being able to find vmware-tools…  So what…
22.    The system will reboot.
23.    Take note of the server’s address.  You will see a message stating VA Management Console can be access at https://:8000
24.    Open a browser and go to that address.
25.    Log in using the default admin account.  admin/admin
26.    Click on Configuration at the top and select time keeping.  Change the date/time/zone to match your area.
27.    Click save and you should get a message stating that the changes will take affect the next time you restart.
28.    If you want, you can set a static IP and other config settings from this page, but for the purposes of this example we will leave everything else allow.
29.    Restart the server now by click on the reboot button at the top of the web page.
30.    When the server comes back up, verify the IP address.
31.    Now open a browser and go to http://
32.    Click on Next.  Click Next again.  Click Finish.
33.    You will now be presented with a Cacti login screen. The default username and password is admin/admin.  Once you enter that you will be forced to change your password.  For my test, I just entered admin in twice to leave it unchanged.  Bad security?  Yes, but this is just my Proof of Concept test.
34.    Now you are in and the system is up.  Before we go any farther, I am going to point you to the Cacti user manual.  This is a must read.  Cacti, is very configurable and in being so, it is easy to render your system useless and broken.  The manual is here:  http://docs.cacti.net/manual:087
35.    Assumptions:  Cisco router with an SNMP RO community string set.
36.    With that out of the way, I will go through one example of monitoring a router and setting up graphs for it.
37.    Click create devices and click add in the upper right hand corner.
38.    Fill in a description,  enter the IP Address or DNS name, select Cisco Router from the Host Template drop down.  Select SNMP Version 2 and enter the appropriate RO community string.  Then click create.  If successful, you should see at the top of your screen “Save Successful” and under Ping Results… “Host is alive”.
39.    To the right of that a “Create Graphs for this Host” link.  Click it.
40.    Towards the top, check the box for “Create: Cisco - CPU Usage” then scroll down and click create.  Click create again.
41.    Now select the interface(s) you want to monitor and click create.
42.    Now click on the left hand side toward the top “Graph Trees”.  Then click “Default Tree”
43.    Then click add.  The Parent Item is root, the Tree Item Type is Host, Choose your host from the drop down and select create.
44.    Now click the graphs tab at the top.  You should see your host under the default tree.  It will take approximately 5 to 10 minutes for graphs to be created and enough data to start plotting.
Have Fun!

Converting a Physical Server (or Virtual Server) to Oracle VM (or Xen)

I needed to move some physical Windows 2003 servers.  The site I wanted to move these servers to already had a substantial Oracle VM Server environment that I had built up.  Oracle VM is based off of Xen.  Using Oracle's P2V whitepaper led me to a converted virtual machine that would not boot.  After much searching I found a process that worked for me.  Pulling from different areas on the web the process I came up with is this.

Note:  This process works for Physical servers or Virtual servers (Example:  VMWare).

   1. On the server you wish to convert you need to do some prep work.  You'll need to make sure the server has ide device drivers available and the registry needs to be made aware.  Believe it or not Microsoft has a KB article that details what we need to do.  The section of this KB article we need is under the heading "More Information".  The article can be found here - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082
   2. In summary you need to extract the Atapi.sys, Intelide.sys, Pciide.sys, and Pciidex.sys files from the %SystemRoot%\Driver Cache\I386\Driver.cab file and copy the files to the %SystemRoot%\System32\Drivers folder and then copy the registry section to a file (Example: mergeide.reg) and merge the file in to the registry.
   3. Use the free VMWare converter tool to convert the Physical machine to a vmdk file.  If you are doing this on a server (HP or Dell for example) make sure you unselect any management partitions.
   4. Copy this vmdk file to your Oracle VM (or Xen) Server and run the following command:  # qemu-img convert (filename).vmdk (filename).img
   5. Then create a Windows 2003 guest VM (or which ever the OS is of the box you are converting) and make sure it is shutdown.
   6. Remove the img file for the guest you just created and replace it with the one you created in step 4.  Make sure you rename your new image file to the same name as the one you removed in the beginning of step 6.
   7. The guest VM should boot up.  Once your image is up, remove any VMWare tools or conversion programs and remove any Vendor specific management programs (example HP or Dell utilities).


Done.  This process worked for me.  Hope it will help you too.