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September 7, 2017 September 7, 2017 Ben Liebowitz

Using PowerCLI to Create a Local Scratch Partition

My company recently purchased some Dell Servers with ESXi installed to local SD cards. The issue we had was that the 8gb SD cards that came with the server and there wasn’t enough space on the cards for a scratch partition. We ordered the servers with a single 300gb HD in order to get the RAID controller, so we decided to use that drive to store a scratch partition. The first step in the process, was to convert the drive

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August 9, 2017 Ben Liebowitz

Script to disable protocols older than TLS 1.2 and turn off RDP

My InfoSec team came to us asking we disable anything older than TLS 1.2 and turn off RDP on our servers in the DMZ. We don’t allow RDP in the DMZ anyway, and they found that leaving RDP on when not using it poses a security risk. To do this, it involved multiple registry changes. With several servers to do this on, I wrote a PowerShell script! Only problem is, I don’t know which protocols are going to exist already

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June 30, 2017 October 20, 2017 Ben Liebowitz

PowerCLI Script to Check Host Over-commitment Percentage & Ratios

At my previous employer, we had a Dev/QA vSphere environment that was very over provisioned. The environment had lots of CPUReady issues with VMs having to wait for CPU time, which caused things to be slow, etc. We knew this but the application teams didn’t understand. I ended up writing a PowerCLI script to check the CPU overcommitment and sent the results to my manager who was able to go to the application team’s management and get them to clean

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June 27, 2017 Ben Liebowitz

Script to backup your vCenter DRS Rules

I was thinking yesterday, I have a script that I run on a monthly basis to backup my vDS configs… Shouldn’t I also have something that does the same for my DRS rules? So, I wrote a script that I can schedule to run on a weekly/monthly basis to backup my DRS rules. I have multiple vCenter servers, so I used an array to connect to each one and then exported the rules for each cluster within those vCenters. The

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June 15, 2017 June 15, 2017 Ben Liebowitz

PowerCLI Script to create new vDS Portgroups

We deployed new hosts into one of our office locations. Because these hosts would have different number of uplinks as well as use a LAG group instead of normal dvUplinks, we decided to create a new vDS Switch. Then, we needed to re-create all the portgroups as well. I figured, instead of manually adding 15-20 portgroups, I’ll automate it. I used this blog post as reference to do some of the work, and added the LAG and uplink changes. When

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June 7, 2017 June 27, 2017 Ben Liebowitz

Disabling FCOE on vSphere 10gb NICs per VMware KB 2130092

So, we recently had an issue with some of our Dell blade vSphere hosts. Seems they all crashed (PSOD) at the same time (6 nodes across 2 different clusters). After submitting the log bundles and Dell TSRs, support recommended, along with upgrading drivers & firmware (the support go to!) that we remove FCoE from the NICs (as it’s not being used). VMware said the FCoE messages in the logs was just “log spam” and not anything they felt would have

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June 5, 2017 July 5, 2017 Ben Liebowitz

Creating shortcuts for PowerCLI that automatically log you in.

So, I started a new job a couple of months ago and we have multiple vCenter environments. My friend & temporary co-worker, Brian Spagna (@bspagna) and I both wanted to have shortcuts to launch PowerCLI windows and have a different background color for each to easily identify which environment we were in. We thought it would be cool to have it automatically connect to it’s respective vCenter also! I recommend you upgrade to the latest version of PowerCLI (6.5.1) for

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March 14, 2016 May 17, 2017 Ben Liebowitz

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 latest Host Updates, I also wanted to upgrade Dell’s Open Manage Server Administrator to the latest version. In the past,

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November 12, 2015 November 12, 2015 Ben Liebowitz

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 make a change, run a report, etc. But then I got to thinking, wouldn’t it be easier if I just

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November 6, 2015 November 6, 2015 Ben Liebowitz

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 Virtual World. You can find Gabe on twitter here! For some reason, the export script didn’t work for me here.