PowerCLI

VMware has been working on building an influencer program for the VMware{code} community for sometime. I am proud to announce I am one of the inaugural coaches for 2020!

Welcome to the first of many Pure Storage blogs. As I get ramped up with the latest information I plan to do a series of getting started with Pure Storage features. These blogs will cover things such as the vSphere Client (HTML5) Plugin, FlashArray, FlashBlade and integrations with other VMware products. First up is learning to install and update the Pure Storage vSphere Client Plugin.

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 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 have been in process in configuring traffic shaping for multiple port groups. It seems with PowerCLI 6.3 R1 there are no native Powershell Cmdlets. Luckily I stumbled across @Lucd and his PowerCLI functions to manage these settings, i have put these into a script to mass get and set the settings for all port groups of a DVS’s. Pre-Requsites VMware PowerCLI Link to Script Get-VMwareTrafficShapingSettings.

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 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 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.

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.