Another New Blog Platform!

So it seems there is a bit of battle between the Jekll/Hugo/Ghost platforms. I have been trying to be a little more flexible with Jekyll and it was giving me issues, so I decided to switch to Hugo. After doing the redesign I have been getting feedback that it is much cleaner, so I hope you enjoy it too!

All links should be functional and moved nicely, if they dont work, please leave a comment!

I have been working on doing a vCenter Consolidation Project. This included migrating our systems to a new vRealize Operations Server. This particular one included 73 different vSOM keys, and as you may know there is currently no way to enter in multiple keys at a time. I reached out to Kyle Ruddy and he informed me there is an API to do this, and that started my adventure to get this working.

I have been waiting for native GUI support for L2TP vpn with local users and it is finally here! Ubiquiti Unifi Equipment now supports local radius auth using the 5.5.x code of controller! Please see below on how you can get this setup. For my example i will be using the Stable Candidate 5.5.11.

Unifi Controller 5.5.11

Configuration is quite simple! Just follow these few easy steps and you will be up in no time.

I have been working on doing a vCenter Consolidation Project. This has meant recreating multiple permissions groups. I couldnt find an easy way to apply permissions at a datacenter so I updated this script to be used.

Pre-Requsites

• VMware PowerCLI

Link to Script

• Set-vCenterPermissions.ps1
• permissions.csv

Preparing to Execute the Script

The script is pretty straight forward, just need to update columns in the CSV such as Datacenter, Group and Role.

I am honored to have been selected as a VMware vExpert once again for 2017!

This is my fifth year as a vExpert (2013,2014,2015,2016 and 2017). It has been great to see the community grow and the amount of vExperts increase. I did a quick count, and in 2016 we are up to 1464 vExperts!

Warning:

A few others and myself have noticed that when updating a VCHA Cluster to 6.5U1 it resets the hostname to localhost.localdomain stopping vCenter Web Client from Loading.

It seems to be isolated to Advanced Deployments and not Basic. I would recommend destroying your VCHA Cluster, updating, then redeploying in this scenario.

Warning2:

It also seems that if you try to redeploy VCHA Advanced after an upgrade, it still resets the hostname, I have a case opened and will update here as neccessary.

The first vSphere 6.5 Patch (6.5a) was just released! So far it seems there are a few …

One of my favorite new features of vSphere 6.5 is definately vCenter HA. I was checking out alerts when I noticed i had an alarm for vCenter HA being degraded.

Looking through the GUI, I was unable to find anything in regards to why the Health was a warning and why the components would not sync. Then I remembered a previous case I had opened for VCHA.

There is a log file located in /var/log/vmware/vcha

Can you easily export PowerDNS zones using a MySQL DB? The answer may not be as easy as it seems.

I have been working on a Migration from PowerDNS using a MySQL DB. We have a custom solution which gets updated and gets pushed to Akamai. The problem is, this custom solution requires all the zones to be in bind format. Doing some research I found out there is no easy way to get these zones into a bind zone file. You could setup a secondary server and do zone transfers, but that wouldnt meet my requirements.

I had a use case I wanted to investigate in regards to the new VCHA that is part of VMware vCenter Server 6.5. One thing I noticed, is when you have VCHA configured, there is no way to know which node of the HA cluster you are connecting to without being logged on.

As people have noted before William Lam’s - How to Customize Webclient Login UI

I figured since I am using the embedded SSO, I could update the login page to show any information for that particular node. In my case I updated the text to show which node you are connected to. You can see this without even logging in!

So VMware Flings have been on a roll recently. They have released what they call “VMware Content Library Assistant.” This is a java based CLI app, that connects to your vCenter and searchers for your templates and then automatically creates and uploads them.

You can find the fling at the following URL…https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vsphere-content-library-assistant)

Once you download the fling, you can just run the following command.

1java -jar sphere-content-library-assistant-1.0.jar -s servername -u username -p password

In my case my java home isn’t setup on my mac …