Virtually Jason

Have you ever been in a situation where you've needed to reload a VM's VMX file?  It's not very common, but it does happen occasionally.  VMware has a KB Article about how to do it, but it requires vim-cmd, which means that you need access to the host's CLI.  This isn't that big of a deal, unless you need to reload a lot of VMs that are scattered across many ESXi hosts.  Fortunately, Techazine has posted an article about a technique that reloads all invalid VMs via PowerCLI.  In my use case, I only needed to target a small set of VMs, so I just used that technique as follows: @("VM1","VM2","VM3") | % {(get-vm $_ | get-view).reload()}

One of my customers is running many vCenter servers at many different sites.  Each site has its own distributed vSwitch, which we want to be based on an enterprise standard configuration.  That said, each site has specific needs and so needs to be able to vary from that enterprise standard.  What's that?  A repetitive task where many distinct objects need to have precise configurations applied to them?  Let's write a script! I'm going to experiment with posting this script to GitHub rather than trying to put the thing in here as text.  It'll hopefully make it easier for people to use and will give me some version control and generally make it easier to access these things.  Before you use the script, make sure that the Distributed vSwitch exists and that your PowerCLI session is connected to vCenter.  So, how's this script work? Well, you call it like this: make-vdspg.ps1 -vdswitch site-vSwitch But it actually has more options than th...

One of my customers wanted to reset the root password on all of their ESXi servers.  This can be easily done through a Host Profile (which is particularly useful if you don’t know the root password), but that would require putting the hosts into maintenance mode and waiting for all of those vMotions to apply.  There’s no need to put a host into maintenance mode just to change the root password, and so we looked for a better solution. Jeff  found the PowerCLI cmdlet, set-vmhostaccount , and with that, we went to work.  The script is actually really simple – it just connects to the ESXi host, then uses the set-vmhostaccount cmdlet to change the password, and records the change. For flexibility, I included a few variables as parameters.  You may want to select only a subset of ESXi servers, and so there are both -hostSuffix and -hostPrefix parameters.  If the hosts that you want to target are all called Sac-ESX#.lab.local and the production hosts that you’...