Notes about interesting problems that I've come across and their solutions. Focused on Virtualization and the accompanying technologies that make it all possible!
2017 vExpert
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I'm proud to announce that I've been selected as a 2017 vExpert! Thanks for the recognition and congrats to all of the other vExperts, particularly my coworkers Jeff and Dennis!
One of my customers is standardizing the configurations on their HP C7000 enclosures (they've been set up at various sites by various administrators with varying involvement from the architecture team). As such, we need to stand up some temporary resources so that we can take down the main enclosure for reconfiguration. That's fine, we can easily ship a smaller enclosure to each site for temporary compute resources. Some of the sites are using Standard vSwitches, so we need to be able to quickly copy the networking configuration over from their existing blades to these new, slightly different blades. As I see it, we had 2 good options: 1) Capture a Host Profile with the desired vSwitch configuration. Delete every other component of the Host Profile so that only the networking section is applied; design the new ESXi hosts so that the vSwitches'll work with the old vmnic-to-vswitch configurations. 2) Write a script to clone the vSwitch from ones ESXi host...
(8/10/2015) Update: Unfortunately, some backend things have changed since I originally cobbled this script together and it doesn't work any more. I'll fix it if I get the chance, but in the meantime, there's a free utility called RVTools that can identify orphaned VMDK files (which are entertainingly called Zombie VMDKs on the vHealth tab of the application). That's a great application to be aware of anyway, as it makes it very easy to get access to a lot of important information that the vSphere client obscures. (11/9/2015) Update: I went ahead and put together a post detailing how I used RVTools and a helper script to identify, rename and then delete orphaned VMDK files . Every organization has to wrestle with orphaned VMDK files. What is an orphaned VMDK file, you ask? It's a VMDK file that's sitting on your SAN, consuming expensive storage, but isn't actually being used by any VM. They're notoriously hard to find (especially...
Hey everyone - I recently put together a script to make it easier to move a VM around between various networks. It moves the VM onto the specified Port Group and then uses VMTools to run a PowerShell script in the guest (this is for Windows VMs only, sorry!) to update its IP/DNS/Gateway/etc. Since my old Gist'ing technique isn't working any more, so it's below as simple text (and it's on my GitHub if you want to grab it that way). But first, let's break it down a little bit! The bulk of this script is really straight-forward. The most interesting bit is using the PowerCLI Invoke-VMScript cmdlet to do the work inside the target VM's OS (since this operation will break network connectivity). Invoke-VMScript is, on the surface, similar to the core PowerShell cmdlet Invoke-Command... but they way that they operate is completely different under the covers! The practical difference that made the most impact for me is that Invoke-Command allows access to th...
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