Author: Ben Liebowitz
One of my favorite tools – Remote Desktop Manager by Devolutions
One of the tools I’ve been using for many years now is called Remote Desktop Manager by Devolutions. Based on the name, you’d think it’s just another RDP tool, but it’s much MUCH more! There are 2 versions of the product. There is a FREE version, which gives you limited functionality, and an ENTERPRISE version for full functionality. There is…
I NEED YOUR HELP – VMworld & GoFundMe Edition!
WHY: Last year was my first time attending VMworld. As someone who’s whole career is currently centered around VMware products, this conference is THE conference to attend. I received a free conference pass to VMworld in Las Vegas this year, however I am looking for assistance covering the Travel Expenses (Airfare, Hotel, Transportation). I’ll cover meal costs myself. ABOUT ME: I am…
Mission: VMUG Virtual Event – May 17, 2016
As a VMUG Leader, I felt like I needed to post a blog entry on the upcoming VMUG Virtual event on May 17th, 2016. The VMUG Virtual Events are always packed with information from VMware and vendors as well. VMware is presenting on topics like: VSAN 6.2, vRA & NSX Technical Deepdive, AirWatch, Taking Virtualization to the next level, EUC,…
What do you do when a path to a NFS Datastore goes down?
My QA environment uses Isilon as it’s backend storage platform. The Isilon share is one large storage volume that is setup with different paths (IPs) to the storage. This environment has 6 datastores (6 paths). The other day, we had one of those paths go down, taking down approx 75 VMs with it. I debated attempting to remove the down…
Adding a PowerShell Windows Update Script to my VMware Customizations
In my environments, we typically convert the templates to Virtual Machines once a quarter so we can install Windows Updates. This means, there could be a number of patches to install if you’re 2+ months out from the last time they were updated. So I decided to use a PowerShell script that my coworker wrote to do Windows Updates and…
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…
Place a vSphere Host into Maintenance Mode via PowerCLI
So, we had two different vSphere hosts, in two different environments, have hardware faults this week. One had a bad memory module, and the other a bad FAN. As I launched the VI client for each environment and placed the problem host into maintenance mode, I started to think… “I bet I can automate this!” Depending on how complex your…