Month: December 2017

VMware Cloud on AWS Cost Assessment

captainvopsrd

VMware Cloud on AWS Cost Assessment

VMware Cloud on AWS Cost Assessment

This video, we will show to run a VMware Cloud on AWS Cost Assessment to help you identify the costs of migrating applications / business services / clusters and VMs from private cloud to VMware Cloud on AWS. vRealize Business for Cloud comes with an easy to use assessment tool, which can quickly give you the number of hosts you will need, your estimated cost and a simple cost comparison to your current private cloud environment.

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Enable TLS v1 In vCloud Director 8.20 and vCloud Availability 1.0

CaptainvOPs

VMware’s vCloud Director (vCD) and vCloud Availability (vCAV) only come with TLS v1.1 and 1.2 enabled out of the box.  This process will show you how to enable TLS v1.  If more information is needed, please visit VMware’s Documentation on vCloud Director 8.20, or the following KB2145796.  This work should be completed after hours as you would inevitably be moving VCD proxy service from one cell to another, and this could cause a brief outage for customers.  This process will require taking the cell offline, so do each cell one at a time starting with a cell not running the inventory service

  • Open an SSH session to a VCD cell, or vCAv cloud proxy cell, and su to root
  • Change to the ‘ /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/ ‘ directory
  • Use the Cell Management Tool to quiesce the cell.  This will move active jobs over to another cell, and cleanly shutdown the cell.  You should make note which VCD cell has the proxy service enabled, and avoid that cell until last.
# ./cell-management-tool -u administrator cell --quiesce true
  • Get the status of any running jobs on each cell.   ** Verify Job count = 0   |  Is Active = false  | In Maintenance Mode  = false
# ./cell-management-tool -u administrator cell --status

Example Output:

Job count = 0
Is Active = false In Maintenance Mode = false
  • Shut the cell down to prevent any other jobs from becoming active on the cell.
# ./cell-management-tool -u administrator cell --shutdown

Example Output:

Cell successfully deactivated and all tasks cleared in preparation for shutdown Stopping vmware-vcd-watchdog:                              [  OK  ] Stopping vmware-vcd-cell:                                  [  OK  ]
  • Run the following command on the vCD cell in /opt/vmware/vcloud/bin/ to enable TLS1
# ./cell-management-tool ssl-protocols -d SSLv3,SSLv2Hello
  • Start the cell service, and validate that a vCD cell has the listener service running from the UI, and that vCenter is connected to one of the cells.
# service vmware-vcd start
  • To validate that TLS v1 has been enabled on the vCD cell, or vCAV cloud proxy cell, run the following command
# ./cell-management-tool ssl-protocols -l

Example output

Allowed SSL protocols:
* TLSv1.2
* TLSv1.1
* TLSv1
  • If you have additional VCD cells, or vCAV cloud proxy cells, repeat this process one at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Network Scanners Can Crash vRealize Operations Manager Tomcat Service On Large Clusters

CaptainvOPs

If network scanners are deployed in your production environments, it may be necessary to white-list the vROps nodes, as the network scanners can bring the tomcat service to its’ knees, especially on active vROps clusters.  In my case the network scanner was causing tomcat to crash, so when users would attempt to access the main vROps , they’d get the following error:

“Unable to connect to platform services”

While troubleshooting this issue, I went through the sizing of the cluster, performance, verifying there’s nothing backing up the vROps VMs, even made sure the datastores and specific hosts were health.  Even tried replacing the “/usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/plugins/inbound” directory and files on all nodes from the master copy in hopes that it would make the cluster healthy again and stop tomcat from panicking.

The following was discovered after reviewing the /var/log/apache2/access_log on the master:

192.216.33.10 - - [10/Oct/2017:04:56:23 +0000] "GET /recipe/login.php?Password=%22'%3e%3cqqs%20%60%3b!--%3d%26%7b()%7d%3e&Username=&submit=Login HTTP/1.0" 301 362 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [10/Oct/2017:04:56:23 +0000] "GET /recipe/recipe/login.php?Password=%22'%3e%3cqqs%20%60%3b!--%3d%26%7b()%7d%3e&Username=&submit=Login HTTP/1.0" 301 369 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [10/Oct/2017:04:56:23 +0000] "GET /recipe/recipe_search.php?searchstring=alert(document.domain) HTTP/1.0" 301 326 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [10/Oct/2017:04:56:23 +0000] "GET /recipe/recipe/recipe_search.php?searchstring=alert(document.domain) HTTP/1.0" 301 333 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [12/Oct/2017:08:30:43 +0000] "GET /recipe_view.php?intId=char%2839%29%2b%28SELECT HTTP/1.1" 301 282 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [12/Oct/2017:08:31:06 +0000] "GET /modules.php?name=Search&type=stories&query=qualys&catebgory=-1%20&categ=%20and%201=2%20UNION%20SELECT%200,0,aid,pwd,0,0,0,0,0,0%20from%20nuke_authors/* HTTP/1.1" 301 410 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [12/Oct/2017:08:31:06 +0000] "GET /modules.php?name=Top&querylang=%20WHERE%201=2%20ALL%20SELECT%201,pwd,1,1%20FROM%20nuke_authors/* HTTP/1.1" 301 342 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [12/Oct/2017:08:31:10 +0000] "GET /index.php?option=com_jumi&fileid=-530%27%20UNION%20SELECT%202,concat%280x6a,0x75,0x6d,0x69,0x5f,0x73,0x71,0x6c,0x5f,0x69,0x6e,0x6a,0x65,0x63,0x74,0x69,0x6f,0x6e%29,null,null,null,0,0,1%20--%20%27 HTTP/1.1" 301 445 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [10/Oct/2017:04:20:19 +0000] "GET /recipe_view.php?intId=char%2839%29%2b%28SELECT HTTP/1.1" 301 282 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [10/Oct/2017:04:20:42 +0000] "GET /modules.php?name=Search&type=stories&query=qualys&category=-1%20&categ=%20and%201=2%20UNION%20SELECT%200,0,aid,pwd,0,0,0,0,0,0%20from%20nuke_authors/* HTTP/1.1" 301 410 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [10/Oct/2017:04:22:32 +0000] "GET /third_party/fckeditor/editor/_source/classes/fckstyle.js HTTP/1.1" 301 284 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [10/Oct/2017:04:22:32 +0000] "GET /third_party/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/advlink/readme.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 292 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [10/Oct/2017:04:22:32 +0000] "GET /rsc/smilies/graysmile.gif HTTP/1.1" 301 253 "-" "-"
192.216.33.10 - - [10/Oct/2017:04:22:32 +0000] "GET /media/users/admin/faceyourmanga_admin_girl.png HTTP/1.1" 301 274 "-" "-"

 

Tomcat service is being pushed to the limits and using many more resources than planned. There is upwards of 10,000 requests in bursts from a single IP address.  From the logs it certainly looks like an attack, but that’s coming from an internal IP address.

My advice – get your security team to white-list your vROps appliances.

To restart the web service on all vROps nodes either by issuing this command to each node: ‘service vmware-vcops-web restart’ , or log into the admin page, take the cluster offline and then back online.