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.ps1
• Set-VMwareTrafficShapingSettings.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 …

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.

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.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.

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. I am hoping when that is available, I will update this post.

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. I opened a case with VMware and our Storage vendor and no one had any idea what was causing it.

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.

Ever wonder why a VM isn’t on the network?

I was working on deploying some test VM’s and for some reason all the VM’s that were cloned decided to start with the network disconnected, and the connect on power on was also not selected.

I decided to throw together this quick one-liner that will make sure every VM is set to start connected on power on and is currently connected.

I wanted to share this handy script i created when you have a need to build out a new vCenter.

This script can be extremely handy as it will take care of creating the datacenter, cluster, adding hosts, creating datastores and then applying the appropriate host profile. It is all done via CSV files so it is extremely customizable.

Files to modify to customize your configuration

• createdatacenter.csv - Contains the name of the datacenter to create.
• createcluster.csv - Contains the name of the cluster to create and the datacenter to put it in.
• createhosts.csv - Contains the Name of the host and …