Virtually Jason

A customer recently came to me with the need to use ESXCLI to configure a bunch of storage settings on all of their ESXi hosts.  He had been planning on connecting to the local console of each host and then executing the command, but wanted to know if there was a better way.  Of course there is!  We could use plink to run a script on his workstation that would establish SSH connections to his servers and then execute the ESXCLI commands... or we can do it all through PowerCLI! I actually tackled this same problem 5 years ago using get-esxcli.  At that point, I did it with the normal V1 version of the cmdlet, which required carefully spaced lists of parameters, leading to ugly lines like this:  $esxcli.storage.core.device.set($thisLUN.CanonicalName,$null,$null,$queueFullSample,$queueFullThreshold,$null) No more!  Now, we have access to get-esxcli -v2 , which is much easier to use!  Instead of needing to put a bunch of $nulls into the .set() method ...

I recently worked with a customer to upgrade their Horizon VDI environment's Windows vCenter 5.5 server to the vCenter Server Appliance running 6.5.  I knew from an earlier experience that such a migration could potentially be challenging, but I hoped that things would go more smoothly this time, since that old issue was from before the Migrate  option was introduced.  This customer also had a smaller, completely isolated DR VDI environment that we could upgrade first, to prove out our process.  So, that's what we did! The migration of the DR environment went without a hitch.  We even spun up about 20 desktops and had a few IT staff log into and use them during the upgrade, so that we could be confident that we'd identify any issues that might impact the users during the production migration.  Everything went great, so we confidently moved forward with the production migration.  You can probably guess what happened next. Fortunately, we didn't run ...