Deploying Vembu BDR Suite (Part 4 – Replication)

Now that I have Vembu setup and backing up to my local NAS, I thought I should try and replicate some of the data off-site. Where should I replicate to? Lets go with Amazon, as I already have an account established there. First, I created a new S3 bucket to replicate the backup data to. I decided to name it…

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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…

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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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Configuring my Dell PowerEdge R920 for dual SD Cards instead of Internal HDs

We recently setup a Dell PowerEdge R920 that was in storage to add to our VDI Environment for additional resources.  This server differs from the other R920s in our environment as it has dual SD Cards internally instead of Hard Disks.  I had to configure the SD Cards in a mirror so we had fault tolerance, so this is the…

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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…

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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,…

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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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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…

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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…

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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…

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