BMC Helix Discovery

Hello Once again!

Today I had a good friend at past company (Southern Glazers Wine and Spirits) reached out to me in regards to a project I was leading / executing before moving on.

The project consisted of our mid level managers / directors deciding on the direction of our data centers. We also had two cloud platforms. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure that we also needed to evaluate for the potential of migrating our on-premise workload to.

We had just merged together two very large companies to create the largest in North America – and now we needed to shed our operating burden by reducing the amount of data centers we were co-located at.

In order to do so we need to identify all our our resources: From Applications, Storage, Programs, Process, Network Traffic, Users, Rights, security considerations and various other fast flowing transnational data.

The project manager and team I was working with at the time decided to use BMC’s Helix Discovery tool. At first it appeared to be very complex and top heavy, but as I committed more time to the tool it started to make a lot of sense and come together nicely. They have a “Cloud” based version and an on-premise (which was an .ova file / linux appliance).

I was able to retrieve credentials from various i-series admins and AS400 operations to see the transnational data from some of our largest databases. Also with the SQL and Orcale databases. Next came out Windows Servers running various versions from 2003 all the way up to 2016. I also became a lot more familiar with the Linux OS as the utility runs off a debian distro, and a lot of our resources were a Unix based OS.

When all was said and done I was able to present the demo to a very large audience that included multiple VP level execs in order to show them our game plan and move forward with the consolidation of data centers saving the company millions of dollars.

See attached screenshots:

Quick notes:

You can extend the /usr partition thus /usr/tideway/var would be extended as well as that directory is part of the /usr partition.
What I will explain is NOT documented and can be risky if it is not done exactly as described. I've used this method several times on our production ADDM scanners and consolidators without any issues.
 
This is the step to step instruction you MUST follow.
 
1. Take a snapshot of the disk. This is a MUST as it will allow you to recover should any of the following steps fail!
 
Verify on the VM that /partition /dev/sda10 is used by file system /usr. You can use df -h to see if it is or not. This is from my server:
 
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7             992M  229M  713M  25% /
tmpfs                 3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             243M   33M  197M  15% /boot
/dev/sda6             1.5G   35M  1.4G   3% /home
/dev/sda3             2.0G   68M  1.8G   4% /tmp
/dev/sda10                 47G   5.4G    39G   13% /usr
/dev/sda5             1.7G  115M  1.5G   8% /var
/dev/sda8             868M   26M  798M   4% /var/log
/dev/sda9             868M   45M  779M   6% /var/log/audit
 
2. Ask the administrator of the VMware server the VM is located on to extend the current disk for the VM, let say with 50GB if that is what you need as extra disk space.
 
3. Reboot the VM.
 
4. afterf reboot. login as root and invoke utility cfdisk. The cfdisk should give you a display like this:
                                         cfdisk (util-linux-ng 2.17.2)
                                               Disk Drive: /dev/sda
                                         Size: 73014444032 bytes, 73.0 GB
                               Heads: 255   Sectors per Track: 63   Cylinders: 8876
     Name             Flags           Part Type       FS Type                [Label]              Size (MB)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                      Unusable                                         1.05      *
     sda1             Boot             Primary        Linux ext3                                     262.15      *
     sda2                              Primary        Linux swap / Solaris                          8589.94      *
     sda3                              Primary        Linux ext3                                    2147.49      *
     sda5             NC               Logical        Linux ext3                                    1854.94      *
                                       Logical        Free Space                                       0.58      *
     sda6             NC               Logical        Linux ext3                                    1611.10      *
     sda7             NC               Logical        Linux ext3                                    1074.80      *
     sda8             NC               Logical        Linux ext3                                     940.58      *
                                       Logical        Free Space                                       0.90      *
     sda9             NC               Logical        Linux ext3                                     939.68      *
     sda10            NC               Logical        Linux ext3                                   51296.34      *
                                      Logical        Free Space                                    4294.97     *
       [   Help   ]  [   New    ]  [  Print   ]  [   Quit   ]  [  Units   ]  [  Write   ]
 
In this example I only added 4GB, you see that as the Free space in the bottom as 4294.97
Use the arrow key to go down to the free space, select New and press Enter.Accept the Size value. Next is to select the Write. this is used to write the update partition table.(the warning that this might destroy data can be ignored as no data is destroyed in this case)
Answer yes that you are sure. You might get an error saying that the re-read of the partition table failed. That is ok so next step is to quit cfdisk and reboot.
 
5.After reboot. Login as root and shutdown ADDM using command: service tideway stop
 
6. Invoke fdisk as: fdisk /dev/sda
 
press u. This will change so units are displayed as sectors. This is very important!
 
press p. This will show you the current partitions. In my example it looks like this:
 
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      514047      256000   83  Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2          514048    17291263     8388608   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3        17291264    21485567     2097152   83  Linux
/dev/sda4        21485568   142606335    60560384    5  Extended
/dev/sda5        21487616    25108479     1810432   83  Linux
/dev/sda6        25110528    28256255     1572864   83  Linux
/dev/sda7        28258304    30355455     1048576   83  Linux
/dev/sda8        30357504    32192511      917504   83  Linux
/dev/sda9        32194560    34029567      917504   83  Linux
/dev/sda10        34031616    134217727    50093056   83  Linux
/dev/sda11      134217791   142606335     4194272+  83  Linux
 
The /dev/sda11 is the new space we added above. The /dev/sda10 is used by the /usr partition. You can verify that by using df -h before you invoked fdisk but on all ADDM servers we have /dev/sda10 is always the /usr partition.
Next step is also critical, write down the Start for partition /dev/sda10. In my example it is 34031616.
Next is to delete partition /dev/sda11 and /dev/sda10. You do that by using command d and press Return.
When asked for partition number specify 11. Invoke d again and this time specify partition number 10.
 
Next is to use command n to add partition 10 again.
When asked for First sector you MUST specify the value you wrote down above, in my case 34031616, you will have another value.
As last sector accept the default value, in my case it will be 142606335.
Next is to write the updated partition table with command w.
You will get an error saying that re-read of partition table failed. That is ok so next is to reboot the VM again.
 
 
7. Login as root again, we are almost done! Should the reboot fail then you need to revert to the disk snapshot you took in step 1 as you most likely specified the wrong value in step 6 for the starting sector.
 
You must now extend the file system using the resize2fs command by invoking it as: resize2fs /dev/sda10. This command will do an on-line resizing. When done do the final reboot to be sure everything is ok but a df -h command will show that /usr has been extended, in my case from 47GB to 51GB.
 
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7             992M  229M  713M  25% /
tmpfs                 3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             243M   33M  197M  15% /boot
/dev/sda6             1.5G   35M  1.4G   3% /home
/dev/sda3             2.0G   68M  1.8G   4% /tmp
/dev/sda10             51G  5.4G   43G  12% /usr
/dev/sda5             1.7G  115M  1.5G   8% /var
/dev/sda8             868M   26M  798M   4% /var/log
/dev/sda9             868M   45M  779M   6% /var/log/audit
 
8. You should now delete the disk snapshow for the VM if you can login to ADDM again, this time with more disk space for the /usr partition.
 
 
I hope this will help you. To extend the /tmp another method needs to be used as the above will NOT work. The easiest would be to create a new partition with the required size and use that instead of current partition used for /tmp, in my case /dev/sda3. Agains you will ask the Vmware admin to extend the current disk. Use cfdisk to create a new partition using the extended space. The Unix admin can then create a new file system using this new partition and update the /etc/fstab file to specify the new partition instead of the old one for /tmp.