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Posts Tagged ‘system administration’

Virtualization EcoShell is to be no more

…but PowerGUI has the exact same functionality, with the ability to tie in all your other (Exchange, Active Directory, etc) PowerPacks. The VMware PowerPack has now come back under the PowerGUI installation wizard and is part of PowerGUI 2.3 which can be downloaded from the PowerGUI site here. Lest I start in again on how [...]

Listing VMs and their .vmx location via PowerShell

Pre-migration PowerShell lifesaving tip of the day: get a listing of all your VMs and the datastores they’re living on (’cause we all know your VM names don’t match their storage names, right?) in case you need to re-register your VMs from storage. We’re heading into another datacenter move, and I’ve learned that it’s nice [...]

Setting multipath policy via PowerCLI

This little tidbit saved me a ton of time and right-click pain today. We’re moving a datacenter overseas and I needed to add a ton of datastores to a bunch of hosts, as well as set their multipathing policy for each LUN. Trying to do this by hand? Teh suck. Trying to do this by [...]

Hot damn free thing of the day: Veeam products for VCPs

Well, how’s that for a nice holiday gift? Veeam is offering a free 2-socket license of their products to VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals and VMware Certified Instructors: the awesome Backup & Replication 5 Monitor Plus and Business Reporter If you’re running a home lab, you kind of owe it to yourself to get a [...]

VM folder name mismatch query using PowerShell

Hats off to Luc at www.virtu-al.net for this incredibly useful PowerShell script to identify the display names of VMs and any that don’t match their folder structure. If you’ve ever unregistered a virtual machine in vCenter and sort of spaced where it lived on your datastores, trying to find a VM’s hostname in a bunch [...]

ESX(i) host monitoring – false alarms?

In trying to tighten up some monitoring issues in the current environment I’m working in, I did what most people would think to do – I turned on some alarms in vCenter, specifically “Host connection and power state.” I kinda want to know when hosts just drop off the face of the planet, right? To [...]

More love for PowerGUI and PowerShell

I suck at scripting. I have this big vSphere PowerCLI poster sitting next to my desk that I’m only now learning to reference. But PowerShell is quickly becoming my go-to tool of choice to quickly find out how my vSphere infrastructure is doing. To that end, Quest software released an awesome get-your-feet-wet-with-PowerShell tool called PowerGUI, [...]

Pre-populating vSphere Client connection properties

Why didn’t I find this little trick sooner? On the heels of keeping your VI Client connection listing clean, you can also pre-populate your vSphere Client user name and (if you’re able to) password dialog boxes when launching the client. It’s wicked easy – get to the properties of your VI Client shortcut and modify [...]

Update on a “failed” HA, split-brain event

So some interesting stuff has fallen out of the investigation we’ve done regarding how VMware High Availability handled five of our hosts falling off the network last week. In speaking with VMware’s support staff I’ve learned a few things to keep in mind when planning architecture, as well as how to respond to something like [...]

VirtualBox 3.2 – major update

My favorite hypervisor just received some much-needed updates that really bring it into striking range of VMware’s Workstation or Parallels. Among the most notable additions to the best-priced (free!) product in desktop/workstation virtualization are: Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI for Windows guests RDP [...]