Virtually Jason

Many of my customers request help when preparing for an upgrade to the latest version of vSphere (recently, they've been wanting to upgrade vCenter to 6.5 on the vCenter Server Appliance, but this is generally a recurring request for each new version).  And I get it, there's a lot of moving parts to consider when planning on an upgrade like this.  So, I figured that I'd do a quick write-up about the process that I go through when planning for an upgrade like this. The first thing that I do is compile a big list of all of the solutions in the environment that are dependent on vCenter and ESXi.  I just build a big spreadsheet with 4 columns: Solution, Current Version, Desired Version, and Notes.  When collecting this list, it's important to consider other VMware solutions (such as vRealize Automation Center, Horizon, Network Insight, etc.), hardware platform (is this running on HP BL460c blades?  Nutanix?  IBM?), backup solutions (Avamar is very common amon...

I've recently had the opportunity to do some work with NSX during some server migrations.  That work has been fairly repetitive for each group of servers that we're migrating so, you guessed it, I looked for an easy scripting/automation solution, and PowerNSX proved to be the right tool for the job! As the name implies, PowerNSX is the NSX portion of PowerCLI.  Installing it is a breeze - just use a relatively up-to-date PowerShell window and fire off install-module PowerNSX .  That'll give you access to a whole set of NSX-oriented PowerShell cmdlets.  It's still in beta, so there's a lot of rough edges, but it's still proven to be an excellent tool for many tasks, including manipulating large numbers of VM Security Group Membership settings and creating Firewall rules. One of those "rough edges" involves cached instances of objects.  For example, if I want to add a bunch of VMs to various security groups based on a CSV input, I'd often write ...

I'm proud to say that I have been selected as a 2018 vExpert !  This is my 5th year in the program and I'm very thankful for the opportunities that it has provided me to get to know so many excellent people in the virtualization community.  I can't even count the number of times that I've needed help understanding some concept or solving some problem, and the community has always been there for me.  Hopefully, I've been able to help some of you guys since I started this blog (way back in 2012), too!