Face painting by the fantastic Tina Connolly.

In my professional life we have been chasing after a longstanding issue with the bundled Tomcat server (vctomcat) included with vCenter. While its nice that VMware got around to including a JVM memory sizing option during the install we’ve found that even the “large” option doesn’t cut it for us. Along the way we’ve had a kb or two written about our troubles which begs the question of how do we monitor what is going on with Tomcat?

VMware via its SpringSource division happens to own this fantastic platform for monitoring and performance management called Hyperic. Tomcat is one of the supported technologies out of the box that Hyperic can instrument via Java Management Extensions (JMX). For some dumb reason VMware doesn’t enable JMX out of the box for the “vctomcat” Tomcat instance that is installed as part of vCenter. Fortunately enabling it isn’t too difficult once you figure out where the configuration is and what magic incantation of java options are required.

To enable JMX you need to pass the following java options:

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=6969
-Dcom.sun.mangement.ssl=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false


The jmxremote.ssl option is necessary to make Hyperic talk to the self-signed SSL certificate that is bundled as part of the vCenter web services. Replacing the default certificates is a giant bag of hurt and for whatever reason the vCenter team can’t seem to figure out how to implement SSL support without doing stupid things like hard coding default passwords into the code. It is easier to ignore all this nonsense and to disable security.

To add those java options you simply run the helpful “Configure Tomcat” shortcut that is created as part of the vCenter install. On the “Java” tab enter them in the “Java Options” box on the page:

Once that is done apply the changes and restart the vCenter web services.

The Hyperic agent should now be able to discover the discover the bundled Tomcat process and gather metrics from it successfully.

https://myilo-address/xmldata?item=All

This will return an XML document that contains the model, serial, and firmware revision. It works with iLO, iLO2, and iLO3 adapters.

I have one that has gone through probably 4-5 in-place firmware upgrades over the last few years and somewhere along the way started to provide horrible downstream throughput to clients. No amount of troubleshooting on my part could get it to work correctly. After giving it a reset its back to working as expected – yay for WiFi faster than dial-up.

My daughter Aria drew this hand turkey to celebrate: