Tag: vCenter
My Experience Upgrading vCenter to 5.5 Update 3b
I recently upgraded my vCenter from 5.5 Update 2, to 5.5 Update 3b. As this is a fairly straightforward process, I didn’t expect anything to go wrong. I proceeded through all the main components and once completed, attempted to connect to vCenter… I found I couldn’t connect. Further investigation found that the service would not start! Attempting to start the…
Patching VMware ESXi Hosts via PowerCLI!
*** Updated 5/17/2017 – See below *** This year, I’m trying something new… Anything that I have to do more than 2-3 times, I’m going to attempt to automate it! In keeping with this mantra, I recently had a task come across my plate to patch the 20+ ESXi Hosts in one of my production environments. Along with installing the…
Display list of Multiple vCenter Servers to connect to in your PowerCLI Scripts
If you’re company anything like mine, you probably have multiple vCenter servers in your environment. They may be linked, they may not. In my environment, we have 4 vCenter servers we consider Production, even though one is for QA, and we have a lab environment. Normally, I just connect to vCenter manually in PowerCLI before I run a command/script to…
Migrating Roles & Privileges from an old vCenter to a new vCenter using PowerCLI
So we’re finally upgrading an old environment running vCenter 4.0 to a new vCenter running 5.5. Instead of attempting an upgrade, we’re building new. As it’s a new build, we had to find a way to migrate the roles & privileges to the new vCenter. I have done this in the past utilizing the “Cheap Disaster Recovery” scripts from Gabe’s…
You should backup your VDS Configs with PowerCLI
So, another vExpert that I follow on twitter (@h0bbel) recently had an issue in his home lab where he cut power to his lab, and his vDS lost all the portgroup names. Seeing this post made me think, “I should probably backup MY vDS configs too, as my backups were pretty old! Here are some PowerCLI commands that I found…
PowerCLI Script to change the DRS Slider
So, I have a cluster of hosts that makes up our QA Environment. As with most QA environments, it’s tight on resources and very over-subscribed. On a regular basis, I have to move our DRS Slider to be more aggressive, RUN DRS to refresh recommendations, and then move the slider back. This allows DRS to rebalance the cluster. Today, I…
PowerCLI Script to migrate VMs from one vCenter to another
Hey everyone, this is another guest post from Ben Liebowitz, Matt’s brother. Before I get into the script, I’ll give you some background… We are working on migrating VMs off of our vSphere 4.1 environment to our new vSphere 5.5 environment. The 4.1 environment is using the Nexus 1000v Virtual Switch while the 5.5 environment is using a vDS switch.…
Deploying a VM with PowerCLI in a Semi-Complex Environment
The following is a guest blog post by my brother Ben Liebowitz. I guess virtualization runs in the family! Follow him on Twitter at @ben_liebowitz. ———————————————————————— Last year, while working at a previous employer, I wanted to make it easier for less-experienced team members to deploy VMs, while making sure little to no mistakes are made. I decided to go…
Error 1711 When Upgrading vCenter to 5.1
I was recently going through the process of upgrading my home lab from vSphere 5.0 to 5.1. Everything was going great until I got the following error: Error 1711. An error occurred while writing installation information to disk. Check to make sure enough disk space is available, and click Retry, or Cancel to end the installation. I found a few…
VMware conducting vCenter high availability survey
This week on VMware’s Uptime Blog I noticed a new post asking for customer feedback about vCenter high availability requirements. To that end, VMware has posted a survey for customers to fill out to get more information. To be clear, the survey addresses high availability of the vCenter server itself and does not relate to VMware’s HA feature that is…