Patching VMware ESXi Hosts via PowerCLI!
*** Updated 5/17/2017 – See below *** This year, I’m trying something new… Anything that I have to do more than 2-3 times, I’m going to attempt to automate it! In keeping with this mantra, I recently had a task come across my plate to patch the 20+ ESXi Hosts in one of my production environments. Along with installing the…
EMC Elect 2016 – Thank you!
Today I was officially named as an EMC Elect 2016, my 2nd year in a row and 3rd overall year in the program. To say I’m honored and thrilled is an understatement! A while back I remember Duncan Epping saying something on Twitter similar to, “Everyone at VMware should be a vExpert.” I’m paraphrasing but his sentiment is clear – if…
Display list of Multiple vCenter Servers to connect to in your PowerCLI Scripts
If you’re company anything like mine, you probably have multiple vCenter servers in your environment. They may be linked, they may not. In my environment, we have 4 vCenter servers we consider Production, even though one is for QA, and we have a lab environment. Normally, I just connect to vCenter manually in PowerCLI before I run a command/script to…
Migrating Roles & Privileges from an old vCenter to a new vCenter using PowerCLI
So we’re finally upgrading an old environment running vCenter 4.0 to a new vCenter running 5.5. Instead of attempting an upgrade, we’re building new. As it’s a new build, we had to find a way to migrate the roles & privileges to the new vCenter. I have done this in the past utilizing the “Cheap Disaster Recovery” scripts from Gabe’s…
Place a vSphere Host into Maintenance Mode via PowerCLI
So, we had two different vSphere hosts, in two different environments, have hardware faults this week. One had a bad memory module, and the other a bad FAN. As I launched the VI client for each environment and placed the problem host into maintenance mode, I started to think… “I bet I can automate this!” Depending on how complex your…
You should backup your VDS Configs with PowerCLI
So, another vExpert that I follow on twitter (@h0bbel) recently had an issue in his home lab where he cut power to his lab, and his vDS lost all the portgroup names. Seeing this post made me think, “I should probably backup MY vDS configs too, as my backups were pretty old! Here are some PowerCLI commands that I found…
My First VMworld Experience
So, VMworld US 2015 was my first time being able to experience VMworld first hand, and not by streaming keynotes and watching recorded sessions months later. As a VMUG Leader, I’ve experienced VMUG Meetings and UserCons before (both as a leader and a member) but this was a whole different animal! First off, I…
PowerCLI Script to list VMs not specifically set to Thick Eager Zeroed
First, I’ll start with a little back story. We recently deployed an EMC XTremIO All-Flash storage appliance. The recommendation we got from EMC, for the best deduplication ratios, was to use the Thick-Eager Zeroed disk format. No matter how many times I tell my coworkers to make sure to use this format when deploying VMs to the xTremIO LUNs, once…
PowerCLI Script to change the DRS Slider
So, I have a cluster of hosts that makes up our QA Environment. As with most QA environments, it’s tight on resources and very over-subscribed. On a regular basis, I have to move our DRS Slider to be more aggressive, RUN DRS to refresh recommendations, and then move the slider back. This allows DRS to rebalance the cluster. Today, I…
PowerCLI Script to migrate VMs from one vCenter to another
Hey everyone, this is another guest post from Ben Liebowitz, Matt’s brother. Before I get into the script, I’ll give you some background… We are working on migrating VMs off of our vSphere 4.1 environment to our new vSphere 5.5 environment. The 4.1 environment is using the Nexus 1000v Virtual Switch while the 5.5 environment is using a vDS switch.…