With the addition of OVF/OVA customized properties in Terraform, I figured I would put together a few runbooks for appliances to deploy. This post will cover the details deploy the Nested ESXi Appliance.

An interesting issue came in from one of our customers that they were unable to provision a new vVol Disk on a VM that was based on a VMFS Datastore. After some troubleshooting it seems there was a regression which no longer makes this available in the UI. Take a look at this blog post on how I will cover a workaround.

Now that we have covered the considerations to backup each component in your vSphere Environment, it’s time to think about the rollback or restore process. In the previous post we discussed how to backup each individual component, in this post we will continue the conversation and discuss considerations to restore or rollback your vSphere Environment components.

Platform Services Controller / vCenter Server

When things don’t go right with an update, upgrade or configuration change of your Platform Services Controller or vCenter Server you need to understand the proper steps it …

You spend time planning and implementing updates, upgrades and configuration changes to vSphere Environments. Rollback or recovery is usually the last thing on the mind. Did you know there are multiple ways to successfully backup each component in a vSphere Environment? There are also many ways to recover those same components.

In this series we will talk about considerations to backup and restore or rollback your vSphere environment if we have a need to.

So currently Cisco has an issue with installing their ENIC and FNIC VIBs through Update Manager for ESXi 6.x. Until that is resolved I need to manually push out patches to these hosts. Obviously I do not want to do this manually, so I will be utilizing PowerCLI to accomplish this task.

Pre-Requsites

• VMware PowerCLI

Link to Script

• Install-HostVIB.ps1

Preparing to Execute the Script

The script is pretty straight forward, just need to define a few variables seen below and then you execute the script. I will walk you through the process.

Normally when i need to install and update a host VIB I use Update Manager. However there is currently a bug with Cisco’s latest enic/fnic drivers that wont let you install them via UM.

I had to run these updates on over 50 hosts and I really didn’t want to have to ssh and install it manually. Lucky I remember Brian Graf’s Host Client Install Fling and borrowed some of the code to come up with the below script.