I am honored to have been selected as a VMware vExpert once again for 2016! This is my fourth year as a vExpert (2013,2014,2015 and 2016). 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 1360 vExperts! Can’t wait to see what this year brings.

In the midst of playing with Ansible and figured my most common use case would be executing powershell scripts on remote servers, so scavenged around and put this together. Pre-Requsites ansible ansible-winrm Link to Git Project ansible_powershell Preparing to Execute the Script This script assumes you have already installed and configured Ansible, downloaded the Git Repo and installed the WinRM python module. Define your group variables. Create a hostgroup.yml file in this folder.

In the midst of rolling out Cisco ACI, we have a need to automation creation of filters to apply to contracts. I tried to use the ACI-PowerTool for this task, however it doesnt seem to work with the newer code we are on. So I went back and attempted to use the ansible modules and it worked flawlessly, below is a sample playbook that will create a filter and add the associated filter entries.

I am honored to have been accepted once again as a Cisco Champion for 2016! I had a bit of a gap in blog posts this past year due to a job change. However, look forward to more posts on Cisco UCS and maybe even some Cisco ACI. I am a member of the Cisco Champions Program. Cisco Champions are passionate about Cisco and enjoy sharing our knowledge, expertise, and thoughts across the social web and with Cisco.

I have been constantly trying to figure out the best way to deploy updated agents to some of our virtual desktops. It isnt a large environment so I have no need for SCCM or other deployment tools, but its big enough having to RDP to each VM was a pain. I finally decided to bang out a script, and surprised how well it works. Pre-Requsites VMware PowerCLI Link to Script InstallVMSoftware.

We have multiple clusters within our vCenters that are defined as a rack. Each rack has its own storage, so storage is not shared between clusters. I needed to develop a way to easily replicate templates between clusters, so a local copy existed on each cluster to take advantage of VAAI. I really wanted to utilize the vSphere Content Libary for these, but there is currently no publicly available documentation on how to deploy a VM from a Content Library via a Script.

For conformity, we like to set the UCS Equipment labels to match the Service Profile Name. This allows us to match it quickly without having to dig down into the assigned profile. This script will set the UsrLbl and Name fields on the equipment tab to match the name of the Service Profile. Pre-Requsites UCS Powertool Link to Script Set-UCSEquipmentLabel.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.

Automation, Automation, Automation! I had to download some support bundles for every chassis in our multiple zones. Instead of manually going through the GUI, I figured why not script it! This script will connect to each UCS domain and automatically generate a support bundle and download it for each chassis. Pre-Requsites UCS Powertool Link to Script Create-UCSTechSupport.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.

For the past week, I have been troubleshooting the strangest issue. I have been attempting to move some Windows 8.1 VM’s from our legacy datacenter(iSCSI) to our new datacenter(FC). Whenever I would move the VM to our new DC, it would fail to boot properly. It would boot straight to Windows Recovery. If I moved the same VM to any other type of storage(NFS, iSCSI, Local) the VM would boot perfectly fine.

Welcome to my post about upgrading your VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) to 6.0 U1b. This process is very straight forward. We will begin with updating our Platform Service Controllers (PSC) and then proceed with the vCenter Appliance. SSH to your Primary PSC. If you are currently in the bash shell, type appliancesh to switch shells to run the update. Run software-packages install –url –acceptEulas to download and install the packages from the VMware Repo.