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 entire cluster is remediated.
[Read more…] about Automating VMware cluster remediation 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 DRS-enabled clusters is that you can use the -Evacuate parameter with Restart-VMHost. That parameter, however, will not work in non-DRS enabled clusters. So what do you do if you need to reboot an entire cluster? Or more than one cluster? You could do it manually: that is, selecting a host, vMotioning all the VM’s to other hosts in the cluster, placing it in maintenance mode, rebooting it, waiting for it to come back online, and then exit maintenance mode. Rinse, repeat, gag at the hundreds of mouseclicks you need to endure. 🙂
[Read more…] about Cluster Evacuation & Reboot without DRS: 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. 🙂
[Read more…] about ESX(i) NTP Server settings: PowerCLI