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 ...

One of my customers needed some help with making some zoning changes on their fiber switches after standing up a batch of new ESXi servers.  I already had a script to create 1:1 fiber channel zones on Brocade switches , so that part was easy, but zoning changes to an existing environment are a little scary.  As in, if you really mess it up, the storage is going to disappear and every VM is going to crash, scary.  Fortunately, you've got to really mess it up to cause an issue, and so this customer was willing to allow changes during business hours as long as we promised not to cause an outage ;) So, how can I enforce that promise?  Well, I've got my script to create accurate zones for the new hosts, but that's not really the dangerous part.  If that's messed up, it just means that the new hosts won't work... and since they're still being configured, they're obviously not in production yet.  The dangerous part is when you enable the new zones, in case you s...