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 ๐
[Read more…] about VMware vSphere 4.1 U1 released February 10th
ESX 4
VMware Host Profiles: compliance issue and fix
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 that is available on hosts licensed with Enterprise Plus, and it allows you to take an ESX or ESXi’s configuration profile and apply it to other hosts. It’s a quick and easy way to replicate configurations for hosts in a cluster, and also to monitor a host’s compliance with the selected host profile.
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Managing VMware Tools advanced options: PowerCLI
The other day I was looking at my virtual machines’ VMware Tools status, and sadly, many of them are out of date.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 the related change records and change management meetings), or maybe it’s the sheer number of VMs that I have to manage. I was curious what other folks’ infrastructure looked like, so I posed the question on Twitter: “#VMware admins, how good are you at keeping the Tools up to date?”
[Read more…] about Managing VMware Tools advanced options: PowerCLI
Managing VMware HA’s VM Monitoring: PowerCLI
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 no publicly available PowerCLI cmdlets that offers the ability to manage VM Monitoring at the cluster and VM levels, so in order to accomplish this task, we need to dive a bit deeper into the world of the vSphere API.
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VMware HA Restart Policies: PowerCLI
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 units within our company, and wanted to be sure that their application stack was started in an application-graceful way.
[Read more…] about VMware HA Restart Policies: PowerCLI