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 […]
ESX 4
Controlling VMware Update Manager patch staging: PowerCLI
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
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
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
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. 🙂