ESXi Host vSwitch Network Connectivity Validation
One of my customers is standing up a lot of new resources. The Distributed vSwitch makes it really easy to configure the ESXi hosts correctly with all of the necessary VLANs, but how do you know that they're fully plumbed end to end? The best thing that I can think of is to simply test it; stand up a VM on each Port Group and validate its network connectivity. Of course, you've only got two or three VLANs to test, right? Yeah, right. This customer has a few dozen Port Groups to validate, and since I'm not interested in wearing out my mouse, I decided to script things. To accomplish this particular task, I actually wrote two scripts. One of them is designed to run on a test VM and changes its network identity (IP Address and Default Gateway) and runs the ping test, the other runs on an administrator's workstation and changes the Port Group that the test VM is using. After each script makes its required change, it prompts the administrator to pr...