Category: PowerCLI

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Ben Liebowitz

Using vSphere Tags to Check for Pending Reboot State

You may have seen my blog post on the Test-PendingReboot PowerShell module.  I’ve been using it a lot lately and had the thought to use vSphere Tags to check pending reboot state.  In my environment, we normally check for pending reboot states before patching.  If a server is in a pending reboot state, it won’t receive the patches from SCCM, etc.  We have 3 different groups we deploy patches to.  Staging, Production, and Global (servers outside the US). First, I

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Ben Liebowitz

The Pending Reboot Nightmare… PowerShell to the Rescue!

My company has been having issues dealing with servers in a pending reboot state for quite a while.  Part of it stems from using SCCM to deploy patches and having the patch deployment set to suppress the reboot and our Operations Team reboots the servers manually.  Well, some months require multiple reboots and we get stuck in the rabbit hole trying to get caught up by the next month’s round of patching! I found a PowerShell Module that I’ve found

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Ben Liebowitz

PowerShell Script To Get vMotion Events

Recently, I had the need to get a list of vMotion events to pass to management.  I attempted to use the Get-VIEvent cmdlet for this, but found it wasn’t easy to only pull logs from one specific cluster.  I attempted to use the -Entity option and direct it to the cluster I wanted, but that didn’t work well.  So I decided to do some searching. First thing I came across was the Get-vMotion Module/script in the PowerShell Gallery.  This looked

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Ben Liebowitz

Using PowerCLI to Create a Local Scratch Partition

My company recently purchased some Dell Servers with ESXi installed to local SD cards. The issue we had was that the 8gb SD cards that came with the server and there wasn’t enough space on the cards for a scratch partition.  We ordered the servers with a single 300gb HD in order to get the RAID controller, so we decided to use that drive to store a scratch partition. The first step in the process, was to convert the drive

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Ben Liebowitz

vDocumentation: Check Out These Scripts To Automate Your Documentation!

Now that VMworld 2017 US has come to a close, many of the sessions are already up on youtube to watch. One of the ones I watched yesterday was SER2077BU – Achieve Maximum vSphere Stability with PowerCLI Assisted Documentation.  My friend, Ariel Sanchez Mora (@arielsanchezmor), and his friend, Edgar Sanchez (@EdmSanchez13), put together these scripts to automatically document your environment.  I HIGHLY recommend you check these scripts out!  Also, please send them a tweet or DM as they’re looking for

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Ben Liebowitz

PowerCLI Script to Check Host Over-commitment Percentage & Ratios

At my previous employer, we had a Dev/QA vSphere environment that was very over provisioned.  The environment had lots of CPUReady issues with VMs having to wait for CPU time, which caused things to be slow, etc.  We knew this but the application teams didn’t understand.  I ended up writing a PowerCLI script to check the CPU overcommitment and sent the results to my manager who was able to go to the application team’s management and get them to clean

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Ben Liebowitz

Script to backup your vCenter DRS Rules

I was thinking yesterday, I have a script that I run on a monthly basis to backup my vDS configs…  Shouldn’t I also have something that does the same for my DRS rules?  So, I wrote a script that I can schedule to run on a weekly/monthly basis to backup my DRS rules. I have multiple vCenter servers, so I used an array to connect to each one and then exported the rules for each cluster within those vCenters. The

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Ben Liebowitz

PowerCLI Script to create new vDS Portgroups

We deployed new hosts into one of our office locations.  Because these hosts would have different number of uplinks as well as use a LAG group instead of normal dvUplinks, we decided to create a new vDS Switch.  Then, we needed to re-create all the portgroups as well.  I figured, instead of manually adding 15-20 portgroups, I’ll automate it.  I used this blog post as reference to do some of the work, and added the LAG and uplink changes. When

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Ben Liebowitz

Disabling FCOE on vSphere 10gb NICs per VMware KB 2130092

So, we recently had an issue with some of our Dell blade vSphere hosts.  Seems they all crashed (PSOD) at the same time (6 nodes across 2 different clusters).  After submitting the log bundles and Dell TSRs, support recommended, along with upgrading drivers & firmware (the support go to!) that we remove FCoE from the NICs (as it’s not being used).  VMware said the FCoE messages in the logs was just “log spam” and not anything they felt would have

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Ben Liebowitz

Creating shortcuts for PowerCLI that automatically log you in.

So, I started a new job a couple of months ago and we have multiple vCenter environments.  My friend & temporary co-worker, Brian Spagna (@bspagna) and I both wanted to have shortcuts to launch PowerCLI windows and have a different background color for each to easily identify which environment we were in.  We thought it would be cool to have it automatically connect to it’s respective vCenter also! I recommend you upgrade to the latest version of PowerCLI (6.5.1) for

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