Virtually Jason

I was working with a customer who wanted to configure a Windows SFTP server as the backup target for their VCF SDDC backups, and it was a bit of a pain to get working right, although in the end it wasn't too complicated.  So, I'm writing my notes here! In this environment, the server is not given internet access, so installing the OpenSSH feature took a bit of extra work in Windows.  The key there was to download the FOD ISO from Microsoft and mount that to our VM (not the normal Windows install ISO).  Once that ISO was mounted (as the E:\ drive), I used the following DISM command to install the OpenSSH Server optional feature: dism /add-capability /online /capabilityname:OpenSSH.Server~~~~0.0.1.0 /source:E:\LanguagesAndOptionalFeatures That got OpenSSH installed, so I made sure that the service was set to Automatic in Windows and figured that we were good to go!  Not quite... The server needed some configuration.  The config file is "C:\ProgramData\SSH\sshd_con...

Well, this one is hyper-specific... but in case anyone else needs to do something similar, I figure that I should share!  As a tiny part of a much bigger project, one of my customers gave me a list of VLAN IDs and the IP Ranges that they want to use on each VLAN.  Unfortunately, that list did not include either Subnet Mask or CIDR values, so I had to work backwards from the given ranges to determine what would be an acceptable Subnet Mask.  This process involves some annoying binary math, so you know that I put together a script to do it for me! I wrote the extract-CIDR function to accept two IP Addresses, and then to output the smallest subnet/CIDR that could contain those two IP Addresses (so they don't technically need to be the start and end of the range, but it's safer to use those two).  For example, if I give the script 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.254, I want to get back 192.168.0.0/24.  If I'm playing around with subnets though, I want to be able to give i...

I've been working on a big VMware automation project for a customer who wants to use their Sharepoint site as the source of authority for configuration files.  They are using Microsoft Graph to give me access to that environment, so my permissions do not extend to the standard PnP.Powershell module and I've been learning the Microsoft.Graph module instead. We came across an issue when using the new-MgSiteListItem cmdlet though, where we were getting error messages like "Field 'title' is not recognized."  In this case, there was a field called Title and the configuration that we'd passed the cmdlet specified Title, but the internal workings of the cmdlet were converting the first character to lowercase and thus the whole thing wasn't working.  But, there's an easy work-around! The Microsoft.Graph PowerShell module has a catch-all cmdlet: Invoke-MgGraphRequest.  With it, you can use the Graph API directly, without having to worry about headers and au...

I'm working on a VM deployment script for one of my customers.  As you might expect, input validation is incredibly important, as we want to filter out a malformed configuration before starting the actual deployment.  To that end, I put together a bit of PowerShell that I'm pretty proud of; this script does a basic sanity check on a network configuration . It does a fair amount of work.  Firstly, it checks to ensure that the IP Address, Gateway, Subnet Mask, and all DNS Servers are being supplied as valid IP addresses.  PowerShell makes this trivial to do, as you can cast a string as an [ipaddress] object and PowerShell will parse it for you.  If it's a string that can't be parsed (such as [ipaddress]"JasonIsAwesome!" which is a string that most people would agree is inherently incomprehensible*), it'll throw an Exception and thus end the execution of the script.  So, that most basic input validation is over in a blink... but wait, there's more! Since ...

I've been working on a script for a customer recently, and part of that script checks all of the VMs in their environment to ensure that they comply with the customer's VM Tagging policy.  As you might expect, this script revolves around the get-tagAssignment cmdlet and I've noticed an interesting quirk about how it runs!  I'm not clear on the "why" of it, but run these two commands and compare the results: measure-command {get-vm | get-tagAssignment} vs. measure-command {get-tagAssignment -entity (get-vm)} It's a profound difference!  In this customer's environment, piping the results of get-vm into get-tagAssignment takes over 73 seconds to run... but when I run get-vm as the entity for get-tagAssignment, it completes in a bit over 0.5 seconds! I'm not sure what's going on here, but I do know that once I changed my script to use the -entity property it sure ran faster!

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...