Author: Ben Liebowitz
Turbonomic – Adding Workloads to Production Cluster
My supervisor came to us to tell us about some VM requests that are going to be coming down the pipe. He asked if we could project to see if we have enough resources for these requests, or will we need to add to our production cluster. Some of these requests were quite large (64 cores, and 128gb ram). We…
Data Center Cooling System Maintenance – Turbonomic to the Rescue!
I work in an office building in NYC. We have a data center on-site which has a primary and a backup air conditioner unit. However, the building maintenance team came to us to say they had to do work on the cooling towers that provide water to our AC units, meaning they would have to be powered down for 24…
Achievement Unlocked: VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization 2019!
Today, I took and passed the VCP6.5-DCV-Delta exam there by achieving the VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization 2019 (VCP-DCV 2019) Certification and renewing my VCP6-DCV, VCP5-DCV, and VCP4-DCV Certifications! If you are confused why the version number is not in the certification anymore, please read the VMware blog post here about the new certifications for 2019! I used…
PowerShell Scripting with SCCM
Until now, I’ve done my SCCM patching with the NO REBOOT option set and servers were rebooted manually. Because of this, we were getting further and further behind due to servers requiring multiple reboots each month. In order to resolve this, we decided to go about using the Auto-Reboot option in SCCM and letting SCCM reboot however many times is…
New Blog Logo!
I would like to introduce my new blog logo!!! As you may have noticed, I am a big fan of the company Devolutions and their products! So much so, that I’m part of a community they run where they give points for advocating for them on social media, commenting on their blog posts, etc. I can use these points for…
Using vSphere Tags to Check for Pending Reboot State
You may have seen my blog post on the Test-PendingReboot PowerShell module. I’ve been using it a lot lately and had the thought to use vSphere Tags to check pending reboot state. In my environment, we normally check for pending reboot states before patching. If a server is in a pending reboot state, it won’t receive the patches from SCCM,…
The Pending Reboot Nightmare… PowerShell to the Rescue!
My company has been having issues dealing with servers in a pending reboot state for quite a while. Part of it stems from using SCCM to deploy patches and having the patch deployment set to suppress the reboot and our Operations Team reboots the servers manually. Well, some months require multiple reboots and we get stuck in the rabbit hole…
How working in IT changes you…
In the past, in relationships, I’ve been told that I’m a very negative person. However, I don’t feel that I am. I once had a neighbor that said, “Ben always has a smile on his face… except when he’s mowing the lawn!” I know that I am an introvert, but that doesn’t make me a negative person, just that I…
Headed to VMworld? These are my suggestions…
VMworld 2018 is coming up fast! VMworld US will be in Las Vegas again this year from August 26th through August 30th. VMworld Europe will be November 5th through the 9th. This will be my third VMworld conference. I went in 2015 (San Francisco) and again in 2016 (Las Vegas). Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years……
PowerShell Script To Get vMotion Events
Recently, I had the need to get a list of vMotion events to pass to management. I attempted to use the Get-VIEvent cmdlet for this, but found it wasn’t easy to only pull logs from one specific cluster. I attempted to use the -Entity option and direct it to the cluster I wanted, but that didn’t work well. So I…