Virtually Jason

At one of my customers' sites today, I saw an error message that I've not seen before: VM MAC Conflict.  "Well, that's certainly not good," I thought, as I poked around at the error message.  To my chagrin, I could only find that error message for a single VM in the environment, and that error message wouldn't tell me with which other VM it was conflicting.  So, I could only think of one way to figure out what was going on with this conflict: look at the MAC Address assigned to every NIC on every VM in the environment, and figure out what was causing the conflict.  Easy! No, really, it was easy.  Had I done it by hand, I would certainly have driven myself crazy, but PowerCLI made it nice and easy.  I just used this command: (get-vm | get-networkadapter | ? {$_.MacAddress -eq "<offending MAC Address>").parent Lo-and-behold, it returned 2 VMs.  One was the known VM that had flagged the error and the other was a powered-off VM.  Maybe tha...

Recently, I've written several scripts that need to perform relatively simple operations on a large set of objects (such as moving a bunch of VMs onto a given Port Group or reconfiguring NTP for a bunch of ESXi hosts).  In general, I approach these challenges by generating a list of all of the objects that I want to manipulate, and then I ForEach my way through that list until I've finished all of my work. This approach obviously works just fine; it's the way that we'e written scripts for ages.  Just as you might expect from something that's been done the same way for a long time (particularly something IT related...), that's not really the best way to do it any more.  With PowerShell version 3, Microsoft introduced the concept of Parallel operations.  Starting with PowerCLI 6, VMware changed PowerCLI to make it much easier to use with PowerShell Parallel operations. So, what is a parallel operation?  Well, a simple (and very practical!) example is that For...

One of my customers recently had one of their vCenter 6 Server Appliances go offline.  The VM was still running and responding to pings, but the service wasn't working.  I established an SSH session to the server and went through the basics, and what do you know, "df -h" revealed that the /storage/seat partition was 100% full. Well, VMware has a fine KB Article about a full seat partition and how to solve it.  At least, mostly how to solve it.  The problem that I ran into is that the truncate commands (that free up space) were failing to run because there wasn't enough space on the partition.  When I tried to execute them, I got the following message: "ERROR: could not extend file ... No space left on device" "Hint: Check free disk space." I'll admit to chuckling when I saw the "hint" line.  So, I had to free up some disk space so that I could free up some disk space.  I did a bit of research into how to free up some space on ...