vDocumentation: Check Out These Scripts To Automate Your Documentation!

Now that VMworld 2017 US has come to a close, many of the sessions are already up on youtube to watch. One of the ones I watched yesterday was SER2077BU – Achieve Maximum vSphere Stability with PowerCLI Assisted Documentation.  My friend, Ariel Sanchez Mora (@arielsanchezmor), and his friend, Edgar Sanchez (@EdmSanchez13), put together these scripts to automatically document your environment.…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Script to delete folder older than 30 days… by Name

I had a need, on one of my file servers, to delete some data that was older than 30 days, to clear space.  This would need to be a re-occurring task, so what better way to accomplish it than to script it! Here’s the rub…  The folders are each in a YYYYMMDD format (ex: 20170115), yet the content in the…

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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…

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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…

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