Virtually Jason

Earlier, I published a quick note about basically using SSH from one ESXi host to manipulate settings across all ESXi hosts in the environment.  I've realized that it might be helpful if I include this note, around how I easily turn SSH on or off across an arbitrary number of ESXi hosts in the environment. This script is super basic - run it after connecting your powerCLI session to whatever vCenter servers you're interested in.  Then, pass it the "-h" option and a regular expression that matches the hosts that you want it to manipulate (such as *esx1* or a specific hostname or even just *).  That's it; it'll turn on the SSH service on all of those hosts, which should open the required firewall ports automatically and everything will just work. Turning SSH off again when you're done is just as simple.  Use the command the same way, but with the "-o" switch... and now the script will sweep through, turning SSH off for all hosts that match ...

As a quick followup to my note around the Full netGP Heap Issue , we've found ourselves in need of a way to easily monitor the netGP status across many hosts in the environment while we await the patch that fixes the issue.  I've searched high and low for a way to access vsish or the netGP Heap stats from PowerCLI but haven't had any luck.  So, I've put together a quick and dirty solution... but it gets the job done. All that I've done here is put together a quick PowerCLI script that generates a Shell Script (just redirect the output to a file).  That Shell Script can then be executed from one of your ESXi servers (ensure that SSH is enabled!) in order to pull information from all of the servers in your environment. $AllHosts = Get-VMHost foreach ($ThisHost in $AllHosts) { write-output "echo Host $ThisHost" write-output "ssh $ThisHost 'vsish -e cat /system/heaps/netGPHeap-0x4100013cc000/stats' | grep 'percent free of max si...

As part of the ESXi vCenter Migration  that I performed recently, we had to convert the ESXi hosts back to Standard vSwitches (from the Distributed vSwitch).  The built-in Wizards make the transition from Standard to Distributed nice and easy, but I don't know of any such path for easily moving the other direction.  We determined that we'd manually create the Standard vSwitch with all of the port groups from the Distributed vSwitch... but there were about 20 port groups that needed to be transitioned for each of the hosts in the cluster.  Aside from the arduous labor involved in that process, I was concerned about typos that might be introduced by depending on manual labor to accomplish that process.  So, I wrote a quick PowerCLI script to take care of it. This script takes 3 arguments; Host, Source and Destination.  The Host is the ESXi Host on which the operation should be performed.  The Source is the Distributed vSwitch that should be copied (thi...