Virtually Jason

Every now and then, I find myself needing to use a utility like plink in order to interface with a system, such as a switch or a chassis, during a script.  If I'm just sending configuration commands (and am taking it on faith that they worked...), then it's nice and easy, but if I actually want to extract information from the device, then I've got a bit of a challenge, because those devices (via plink) are not going to give me back an object that PowerShell understands. For example, if I use get-vm in PowerShell, I will get back a vm object that has a bunch of properties, which I can easily access using dot notation.  If I use plink to pull a brocade switch configuration, all I'm going to get back (from PowerShell's perspective) is a great big long string with lots of New Line characters, tabs and spaces.  So, how do I extract data from a formatted text string, in order to more easily work with it in PowerShell?  Well, there's a lot of different tricks availab...

Several of my customers use HP C7000 Blade Chassis for their ESXi hosts.  I've picked up a few tips and tricks for working with that chassis over the years, so I figured that I'd post them here. The Virtual Connect (the blade chassis's networking component) has a feature that can prevent pause frames from flooding a network by disconnecting a blade that is sending an excessive number of them.  Unfortunately, every now and then, it detects an ESXi host's uplink as sending such a number of pause frames and so disconnects that network adapter.  Fortunately, it's really easy to allow traffic to flow through that port once again.  Just SSH into the Virtual Connect (you can get the address by looking at the "Virtual Connect Manager" link in the Onboard Administrator interface.  Once you're connected, use the show port-protect  command to see if there are any ports that are in a blocking state.  If so, you can use the reset port-protect  command to res...