As you know when you read my blog, I like to develop and script a lot of things. One things that was always hard for me was the design of the user interface. The latest release of my ESXi staging appliance is a good example of that. My design is functional but far from pretty. (more…)
One of the things that regularly pops up in our health checks in VMware environments are connected CD Drives that prevent DRS from functioning properly or prevents a host from entering maintenance mode when doing thing like patching. In large environments it can get very tedious to disconnect all those drives manually. With PowerCLI it is just one line. (more…)
If you are knee-deep in a troubleshooting session with a customer you want to be able to have some tools ready that do some tests for you. One of the things that in my case has happened quite a lot was that some network were connected but couldn't communicate outside of the host. So in a HPE Blade Enclosure...
Everyone who works in our industry is familiar with RVTools. It's a great tool that achieves a lot in short time in terms of infrastructure checks. I would not want to do my job without it. One customer wanted to have a e-mail report that showed the "zombie" files on their datastores. After a RVTool check they saw that they...
Once again I'm writing about a customer use-case. In this case the customer wanted to know if all of his many LUNs were actually being used or if there were any they could delete and save some storage space. The customer has a very big environment so it would have been tedious to do this task by hand. PowerCLI comes...
A couple of years ago I struggled with VMware Update Manager in a large environment. The Use case was to update about a 1000 VMs to the latest VMware Tools and VM Version (hardware). The VUM did not do the job and froze in the middle of the job. Unfortunately due to the Shutdowns and reboots required to to...
We recently had to write a script for a customer which would deploy a VM skeleton. The script would be called from an automated solution the customer was building and had the following requirements: Use given service-account for interaction in vCenter Server Do different configuration based on the vm name which is passed as a parameter test servers need to be placed...
I've recently stumbled upon a VMware communities thread where someone had trouble backing up the VCSA database. The were using someone else's script, so I thought I'd share the wrapper script I wrote around two python scripts that VMware has published in its KB 2091961 (more…)
A couple of years ago I made a post about the "REDA - Rapid ESXi Deployment Appliance" which was basically a customized version of the old "EDA" which was available to download from the VMware solutions exchange. When face with a environment that deal with multiple clusters and lots of host the old EDA/REDA was very limited in terms of...
With the latest vSphere 6.0 Update 2 May 2016 HPE Custom ESXi Hypervisor Image to download from VMware HPE managed to reference a uppercase letter in one of its configuration files. (more…)
