Tag Archives: virtualization

Cacti Network Grapher Virtual Appliance

cactiThis virtual appliance is based on CentOS 7 and is designed to be lightweight, and stable. It has only a minimum of tools installed to make Cacti work.

The OS is set to DHCP, and Cacti is installed.

The username at the console, and passwords set for everything should be ‘cacti’ this will include root and mysql. **With the exception of the Cacti web ui “admin” user, which has the password “Cactipw1!” (no quotes)

The web UI username and password are “admin” and “Cactipw1!” (no quotes)

Cacti is all configured up and includes some plugins, which are not installed by default. It also has some additional host templates for Palo Alto firewalls, Cisco ASA Firewalls, F5 BIG-IP load balancers, and a few other things I have found useful over the years.

There is not a ton of documentation, as I simply have not had time.  If you are already familiar with Cacti it should be a breeze.  If there are any questions, please use GitHub Issues, and I can assist and update as needed.




[Update 10/30/2020]

  • Upgraded to new Cacti and Spine v1.2.14 released 8/02/2020
  • Updated all plugins
  • Upgraded PHP to v7.3
  • Upgraded MariaDB to v10.5
  • Various other fixes and tweaks

CentOS7 Appliance with v1.2.14 Cacti, OVA is ~2.6g

[Update 12/10/2019]

  • Upgraded to new Cacti and Spine v1.2.8 released 12/08/2019
  • Updated all plugins
  • Various other fixes and tweaks

LEGACY – CentOS7 Appliance with v1.2.8 Cacti, OVA is ~2.4g

[Update 7/17/2019]

  • Upgraded to new Cacti and Spine v1.2.5 released 7/15/2019
  • Updated all plugins
  • Various other fixes and tweaks
  • Now can upgrade the virtual disk in VMWare

LEGACY – CentOS7 Appliance with v1.2.5 Cacti, OVA is ~2.3g

[Update 1/23/2019]

  • Upgraded to new Cacti and Spine v1.2.1 released 1/20/2019
  • Updated all plugins
  • Various other fixes and tweaks
  • ./cacti-upgrade.sh now installed by default at root of cacti user directory

LEGACY – CentOS7 Appliance with v1.2.1 Cacti, OVA is ~2.3g

[Update 1/4/2019]

New Cacti v1.2.0 is released! TONS of new features and fixes. You can run my update script to automatically update the template. https://github.com/KnoAll/cacti-template this will also offer to update the Smokeping to newly released v2.7.3 as well. There is also a new prompt to disable the Smokeping service if you do not use Smokeping.

 [Update 12/4/2018]

It turns out there has been some development in Smokeping after almost 4 years of quiet! New v2.7.2 is available, so I created a new Smokeping update routine and added it to the script. This will check if you have Smokeping installed, and offer to upgrade if you wish. This can be run via the same routine as the Cacti upgrade from Github below.

[Update 11/28/2018]

I have a first working version of an automated update routine for the cacti-template you can get here. You can get the instructions on how to run it here…

https://github.com/KnoAll/cacti-template

[Update 11/16/2018]

Hello anyone who is listening! the Cacti team is working on the new v1.2 of Cacti which is now in it’s 2nd beta release. I am working on updating the template along with this and there are a lot of changes! I’m also building an upgrade script that can be used to upgrade the appliance with little effort. (Sorry, for now it will only work on the new v1.2.x appliance) More to follow as things progress.

[Update 4/2/2018]

  • Upgraded to new Cacti and Spine v1.1.37 released 3/25/2018
  • Updated all plugins

LEGACY – CentOS7 Appliance with v1.1.37 Cacti, OVA is ~2.2g


ESX Datstore filled up by AVVI Snapshots

One thing that I just learned overnight is that you really should keep an eye on the Snapshots in ESX/vSphere.  We are running the AVVI backups from Backup Exec 2010, and it uses the vSphere storage APIs to do it’s business.  BE has vSphere run a snapshot by calling the API and then it grabs that snapshot and sends it to whatever your backup medium is.

In the past I have seen where a snapshot gets left behind and not deleted.  Last night I started getting paged from our monitoring system that one of our AD servers was offline.  After having to jump through some hoops to get in via VPN (because the AD server was the one used to authenticate and give DHCP to VPN users) I was able to get onto the ESX server.  There I saw that the snapshots had hogged up all available disk space on the ESX box and my AD server was stalled as a result.  It turns out that the snapshots for my Exchange server were piled up and I had to delete them.  Once there was free space again my AD server was back online and everything is OK again.

Now I need to figure out a way to monitor my ESX server for datastore space so that this does not happen again.

Virtual Load Balancer Appliance

In our production environment that we host at Rackspace we have an F5 Big IP load balancer.  This is an excellent  product that has way more features than we can ever hope to need.

One problem with this setup is that in our development and staging environments we do not have load balancing and this has caused some issues when moving to production.  Some of the issues we’ve had stem around session persitence and what server the sessions are landing on.  These can be hard to troubleshoot, and if you aren’t seeing them in the Dev or QA processes you are debugging while in production which is not good.

It became pretty evident that we needed to make our staging environment as much like production as we could, so I started to poke around for a virtual load balancer.  After a bit of searching I found several that seemed to fit the need, but many of them were not free.  With a bit more digging I found that the Zeus Traffic Manager product has a developer licence that is free to use for non production environments.  This suits our needs very well as this is just for staging testing.

I downloaded the VMWare template and had the box up in running in no time.  The initial web config is quick and easy, and the developer license was good for 1 year.  After which I assume/hope I can still get another free one.

The web based configuration is clean an easy to understand.  I have never administered a Load Balancer myself, and even so I was able to get all of our staging sites up and running with thier own pools, healthchecks, session persistence settings and everything we have in production.  Our QA team tells me that the speed is noticably better and it has already helped us uncover some issues that we have been fighting with our production servers.

All in this has been a great addition and the best price you can hope for.

Take a look and let me know your experience

ESX 4.0 and USB devices

I’m having trouble getting USB to work on one of my ESX 4.0 hosts.  I did a bunch of research and found that in the initial release of ESX 4 USB was ‘supposed’ to work but didn’t.  All the posts I read indicated that this was fixed in subsequent releases so I went about the task of upgrading my host to the newest release.

After quite a bit of fiddling I was able to get Update 3 installed.  After this I still have not had any luck getting my USB device to connect.  I’m tryinmg to connect a Serial to USB adapter so that I can connect to a Cisco console cable, or other serial devices.  I do have it working just over the regular com/serial port onboard, but I want it to work via USB so that I can more easily move the connection around to other boxes/laptops/etc.

Much of the info that I read dealt with USB HDs so perhaps they work but not these other types of devices/adapters?  If anyone has any ideas I sure would appreciate it!