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 entire cluster is remediated.
[Read more…] about Automating VMware cluster remediation without DRS: PowerCLI
Setting up SFTP on Windows 2008
Recently, I had a task assigned to me to get SFTP up and running on a Windows 2008 server. I did some Googling and found a few resources, but only by combining the various bits of information was I able to get it up and running. I thought I’d throw it all together into a blog post, in the hopes that it will help someone else out.
ESXi 4.1 remote log collection with VMware vMA 4.1
When I first decided to blog about this, I started doing some Googling for resources. I ran across an excellent post by Simon Long that talked about using vMA’s vilogger capabilities for remote logging, but his blog post was written with 4.0 in mind, and didn’t line up exactly with how things are done with vMA 4.1. My goal here is not to reinvent the wheel with screenshots galore, but merely to document the basic steps and differences in the setup for vMA 4.1.
[Read more…] about ESXi 4.1 remote log collection with VMware vMA 4.1
NetApp PowerShell Credential Bug (Fixed!)
Update: This has been resolved in the 1.3 release of the Toolkit.
I ran into a bug while trying to write a script that would cycle through all of my NetApp filers and change the root password. The issue was that I was unable to pass a PSCredential object to Connect-NaController because passing credentials meant that HTTPS/HTTP would be tried instead of the default and insecure RPC.
After working with Clinton Knight from the NetApp Communities, he determined that the toolkit was attempting to use Internet Explorer’s proxy settings. He was kind enough to provide a workaround, as follows:
[powershell]
[System.Net.WebRequest]::DefaultWebProxy = $null
[/powershell]
Until a permanent fix is introduced to the toolkit, put that snippet at the top of your NetApp PowerShell scripts, and you’ll be able to supply credentials (or -ForceSecure/-ForceUnsecure) to your Connect cmdlets.
OVA’s and OVF’s: What are they, and what’s the difference?
Chances are good that you’ve run into an OVF/OVA from a variety of sources: as a packaged application or appliance from a vendor, as a download from the VMware community appliances site, or even while physically moving virtual machine files from one location to another.
I admit, when I first started administering VMware, I didn’t understand what an OVF or an OVA were, and what their differences are. In order to best understand the differences between the two, let’s take a look at what an OVF is first.
[Read more…] about OVA’s and OVF’s: What are they, and what’s the difference?