Virtually Jason

One of my customers recently found that their ESXi hosts were not uniformly configured for syslog shipping, so asked me to help them audit their environment.  They have hundreds of ESXi hosts, so going through the advanced settings in the GUI for each of their hundreds of hosts didn't seem like the best approach... PowerCLI to the rescue! In this case, I put together a quick one-liner.  It gets all of the VMHosts, then generates a string in the format of "<ESXi Hostname>,<Configured SysLog Host>".  That string is then parsed by the convertfrom-csv cmdlet, which adds the "VMHost" and "SysLogServer" headers to the line.  That line is then output and the system moves on to the next host in the list.  When the command is completed, the system has generated a nice table with a "VMHost" column that is populated by ESXi hostnames and a "SysLogServer" column that is populated with their configured Syslog servers. Importantly

One of my customers is planning on upgrading to vSphere 6.  They have many sites and require that each site be able to operate independently, but want them to be centrally managed under normal conditions.  So, they have a great use case for Enhanced Linked Mode! We're exploring different architectures and how to handle various situations.  One of the situations that we wanted to explore very thoroughly was the loss of a vCenter or PSC at one of the sites and how the recovery process might work.  To that end, we've set up three VCSA + PSC pairs in a single SSO domain and have been ripping them apart and generally abusing them. We've come up with a generally good procedure that covers, start to finish, how to decommission a PSC all the way to how to restore a replacement PSC/vCenter to full functionality.  We've come up with this process by combining the steps from a few VMware KB articles, and so I've decided to go ahead and cover it here in a single workflow.