Big release today for the VMware vSphere 4.1 suite. Depending on the size of the environment you support, you’re either cheering at the small amount of work ahead of you, or sobbing because you just recently got everything updated to 4.1
VMware Host Profiles: compliance issue and fix
January 25, 2011 By 1 Comment
I thought I’d take a moment to write down some frustrations I’ve been having with VMware Host Profiles, and how I resolved it. Before I get into that, let’s take a second to discuss what they’re supposed to do, and how you can get it in your environment. Host Profiles is a VMware vCenter feature [...]
Managing VMware Tools advanced options: PowerCLI
January 23, 2011 By 16 Comments
The other day I was looking at my virtual machines’ VMware Tools status, and sadly, many of them are out of date. It seems like I spend a lot of my time on host patching, but the Tools update seems to fall by the wayside. Perhaps it’s the disruption to production that rebooting causes (and [...]
Managing VMware HA’s VM Monitoring: PowerCLI
January 13, 2011 By 4 Comments
In a previous post, I discussed my need to manage HA isolation response and restart priority settings on a per-VM level (separate from the cluster settings). This post is a continuation of that topic, but covers how to manage the VM Monitoring aspect of VMware HA with PowerCLI. At the time of writing, there are [...]
VMware HA Restart Policies: PowerCLI
January 11, 2011 By 2 Comments
Recently I received a request to disable any automated HA actions on specific VMs across our infrastructure. To some folks that might sound a bit crazy, but there was good reason: an outside vendor supports an application and wanted to be involved any time the VM was powered up/down/etc. They have contractual obligations with business [...]
Finding mismatched NFS datastore UUIDs: PowerCLI
December 17, 2010 By 2 Comments
I’ve run into an issue lately in my VMware environment that really frustrated me because I didn’t understand why it was happening, and because there wasn’t an obvious way of determining that it wouldn’t happen again. The problem I’d been having was mismatched UUIDs on NFS datastores on clustered hosts. It’s a configuration issue that [...]
Controlling VMware Update Manager patch staging: PowerCLI
December 16, 2010 By 5 Comments
As you may be aware, VMware Update Manager has functionality built-in that allows the VMware administrator to stage patches to hosts, for remediation at a later time. There are a number of downsides to the way this functionality is implemented in the VMware VUM GUI.
Automating VMware cluster remediation without DRS: PowerCLI
December 14, 2010 By 3 Comments
As you may be aware, VMware’s Update Manager (VUM) does a great job of remediating vSphere hosts when they’re in DRS-enabled clusters. You select the cluster you want to remediate, verify the correct baselines are attached, and click Remediate. VUM will automatically evacuate each host in turn, then patch, reboot, repeat as necessary until the [...]
Cluster Evacuation & Reboot without DRS: PowerCLI
October 13, 2010 By 1 Comment
If you’ve upgraded to vSphere 4.1 and have Standard licensing, you may have noticed that vMotion is now supported at that licensing level. Previously, vMotion was only available with Enterprise licenses and above. (Storage vMotion is still a feature only available with Enterprise & Enterprise Plus.) One of the nice features about rebooting hosts in [...]
ESX(i) NTP Server settings: PowerCLI
October 5, 2010 By 3 Comments
I read a great post by Roger Lund today that discussed timekeeping in VMware virtual machines. That got me thinking, “How would this be handled with PowerCLI?” A blog post was born.
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