Virtually Jason

One of my customers needed some help with making some zoning changes on their fiber switches after standing up a batch of new ESXi servers.  I already had a script to create 1:1 fiber channel zones on Brocade switches , so that part was easy, but zoning changes to an existing environment are a little scary.  As in, if you really mess it up, the storage is going to disappear and every VM is going to crash, scary.  Fortunately, you've got to really mess it up to cause an issue, and so this customer was willing to allow changes during business hours as long as we promised not to cause an outage ;) So, how can I enforce that promise?  Well, I've got my script to create accurate zones for the new hosts, but that's not really the dangerous part.  If that's messed up, it just means that the new hosts won't work... and since they're still being configured, they're obviously not in production yet.  The dangerous part is when you enable the new zones, in case you s...

One of my customers had a whole collection of ESXi 6 hosts that were all installed from the April 2016 HP ESXi ISO image... and they hadn't been patched since then.  Well, one day they called me because their Splunk server had started sending out alerts from an alarm that we'd set up to monitor the ESXi hosts for memory leaks. So, I logged into one of the affected hosts to try and figure out what was going on.  After poking around in a bunch of logs and a fair amount of google work, I came across this article about a memory leak over at CPU Ready.  It sure looked promising.  So, I followed their instructions to check the version of the broadcom driver in one of the affected ESXi hosts and, sure enough, it was an older version.  Fortunately, HP has a fix available, so I just needed to get it installed on all of the ESXi hosts (since full on ESXi patching wasn't necessarily available, unfortunately). I needed some way to figure out exactly which hosts needed ...