PowerCLI

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.

I wanted to share this handy script i created when you have a need to extend a disk. This script can be extremely handy as it will take care of extending the VMDK and then going to the OS and then performing the expansion there as well. This has been helpful when needing to extend a large batch of servers (60+). Syntax: .\ExtendVMDKandGuest VMNAME You will then be prompted to enter in the Hard Disk #, the size you want to be extended, and then which drive letter that volume belongs to.

I thought I would share this script, its been circulating a bit but I feel it is a nice one to have in your toolkit. Have you ever had to remove a LUN from a cluster and thought “Do I really need to detach all the LUN’s, before un-mapping from my SAN?” Unmount Datastore Detach LUN Un-map from SAN Rescan Cluster Well here is a handy script with output.

So as always things change across multiple Window’s operating systems and VMware revisions. I had a need to extend the drives on about 50 VMs today and really didn’t want to do all that clicking. I remember awhile back it was easy to do this with a Basic Set-Harddisk and use the -ResizeGuestPartition but alas that has been removed from the current functionality. So I took my search to google and found a couple scripts that worked ok, but nothing that was a seamless experience.

I use a customized version of <a href="http://www.virtu-al.net/vcheck-pluginsheaders/vcheck/">http://www.virtu-al.net/vcheck-pluginsheaders/vcheck/</a> by Alan Renouf to connect to multiple servers. However a coworker of mine was trying to run it, and the script would only return data from the 2nd vCenter we were connecting to. Doing some troubleshooting we noticed their DefaultVIServerMode was set to single. This means that only a single servers connection will occur at once. Changing this setting is very easy, there are 3 scopes, but only one really needs to be set.

I had a need to enable CPU and Memory hotadd to many virtual machines prior to a template being updated, doing some research there is no easy way, however there are some functions out there to do it. You can copy and paste each function into a powershell window and then run the associated command. Enable-MemHotAdd $ServerName Disable-MemHotAdd $ServerName Enable-vCPUHotAdd $ServerName Disable-vCPUHotAdd $ServerName Enable Memory HotAdd Function Enable-MemHotAdd($vm){ $vmview = Get-vm $vm | Get-View $vmConfigSpec = New-Object VMware.

We had a strange issue that any time a VM was snapshotted it then forced a reboot and sysprep. Reviewing the customization logs(C:\windows\temp\vmware-imc\guestcust.log) I noticed the following error..Unable to set customization status in vmx. Upon further research it seems this is a known issue and is resolved in ESXi 5.1 Express Patch 5 KB2077640 as referenced in this article KB2078352. However the hotfix only fixes future occurences, you still need to fix all the VMs affected.

Thank you to everyone who listened to me on the EMEA vBrownbag. Here are copies of documentation and scripts on how to configure ESXi to use the remote dump collector. Check the ESXi Dump Collector Configuration Example: Foreach ($vmhost in (get-vmhost)){ $esxcli = Get-EsxCli -vmhost $vmhost $esxcli.system.coredump.network.get()} Setting the ESXi Dump Collector Example: Foreach ($vmhost in (get-vmhost)) { $esxcli = Get-EsxCli -vmhost $vmhost $esxcli.system.coredump.network.set($null, “vmk0″, “IPtoDumpCollector″, “6500″) $esxcli.system.coredump.network.set($true)} Test Host by Causing PSOD Run the following command via SSH or Direct Shell.

Thank you to everyone who listened to me on the EMEA vBrownbag. Here are copies of documentation and scripts on how to configure ESXi to use the Syslog collector. Check the ESXi Syslog Collector Configuration Example: Foreach ($vmhost in (get-vmhost)){ $esxcli = Get-EsxCli -vmhost $vmhost $esxcli.system.syslog.config.get()} Setting the ESXi Syslog Collector Example: Foreach ($vmhost in (get-vmhost)){ $esxcli = Get-EsxCli -vmhost $vmhost $esxcli.system.syslog.config.set($null, $null, $null, $null,"udp://IPtoSyslogServer:514″) $esxcli.system.syslog.reload()} Post-Installation Changes If you wish to change the default port or maxsize of the syslog rotation, these can be changed by modifying the vmconfig-syslog.