PowerCLI 5.5

ESXi PSOD #Homelab #vExpert #ESXi

February 18, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I booted up my HP Z600, this houses my main management VMs and ESXi runs off a usb stick. So nothing fancy. On boot up I got this lovely screen of joy: I don’t like PSODs they make me sad. Looking at the error and the fact that it was happening at boot up made me think of some USB drive issue. Let’s think about it for a minute, when ESXi is loaded off a USB/SD card it will then run in memory, and if you make a change it will save it to the drive or it will save automatically every hour (KB ). One thing you have to remember is to make sure you configure the advance […]

Some Basic #PowerCLI using foreach to modify #NTP and do #ESXi host backups #vExpert

February 6, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

You will have seen my earlier post about learning PowerShell, and now I am using what I think is one of the best things about PowerShell……The foreach loop. I have seen it used many times, and never fully understood it, I kind of got what it did, but now I am getting it into my head and I have been using it to try and various things. So I have been doing more bits in PowerCLI to help improve my scripting skills and just to see if I can make my life easier. Modifying NTP settings on multiple ESXi hosts There is a known bug in PowerCLI 10 where Remove-VMHostNtpServer looks like it has worked, but does not actually do […]

Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Third Edition #BookReview #Powershell #PowerCLI #Scripting #vExpert

January 15, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So if you follow my posts, one thing you will know about me is that I like learning new things and picking up skills. Through my whole time of working with vSphere, I have used PowerCLI in one way or another. I can muddle my way around a bit, but it has always niggled at me that I don’t know it as well as I could. When people were talking about scripting or sharing their scripts, I could barely follow along, and that to me is very annoying. I always at least want to have a solid base understanding. So I finally got around to buying this book and using it. Whenever you ask around about learning PowerShell, EVERYBODY and I […]

Moving from vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 Part 2 #Upgrade #Migration #Fresh #vExpert #vSphere #VCSA

January 15, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 0

So now we have got all the back story out of the way with Part 1, we can get into the meat of it all. The Middle I used various scripts, from various places and used the web client to get everything how I needed it to be. These scripts are provided AS IS, use them at your own risk, they worked for me. I have credited everyone I borrowed the source scripts from, and even provided the location of the source scripts too. A lot of people put effort into making the scripts, so I thought it would only be fair people knew where they came from. I made edits and adjusted as I needed to get the job […]

VMworld Barcelona 2018 #Hackathon H4CK 4 C3N73R #RussianRoulette @kmruddy @vmwarecode @VirtualG_UK @Dark_KnightUK

November 17, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I had the pleasure of attending the hackathon at VMworld and meeting @kmruddy and the mighty beard! So I was asked to join up with Graham Barker @VirtualG_UK and David Taylor (WHO DOES NOT HAVE A TWITTER ACCOUNT) David how can you be a guy that travels around the world for Dell EMC on projects and not even have a Twitter account, you should be ashamed of yourself! They had an idea, that to me was super interesting. They were using VMware Workstation 15 with the new REST API bits, along with PowerCLI to create a quiz. After discussing the idea with them, I came up with the idea of it being called Russian Roulette. In VMware Workstation there was a […]

PowerCLI: the easiest way to create Private VLANS

May 26, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

If you like to test PVLANs but don’t like clicking around in the webclient, try creating them from PowerCLI. The Primary VLAN in each line is always the same one and in your first line, the primary and the secondary VLAN are the same VLAN. This is because the primary PVLAN will also serve as the Pormiscuous PVLAN. I have chosen 200. On the next lines the Primary and Secondary VLANs are different from eachother. $vds = Get-VDSwitch ‘Your vDS’ Get-VDSwitch $vds | New-VDSwitchPrivateVlan -PrimaryVlanId 200 -SecondaryVlanId 200 -PrivateVlanType Promiscuous Get-VDSwitch $vds | New-VDSwitchPrivateVlan -PrimaryVlanId 200 -SecondaryVlanId 201 -PrivateVlanType Community Get-VDSwitch $vds | New-VDSwitchPrivateVlan -PrimaryVlanId 200 -SecondaryVlanId 203 -PrivateVlanType Isolated  

PowerCLI: backup and restore an array of ESXi hosts

May 14, 2016 Kim Bottu 0

The following script makes a backup of the ESXi Host configuration file for an Array of Hosts in a folder on your Management station in C:\BackupMeUp. If you run the backup task multiple times, it will overwrite the saved configuration files for the hosts it already contains a configuration file for. Backup an Array of ESXi hosts Write-Host “Backing up ESXi config to C:\BackupMeUp” $vmhost_array = @(“esxi1.mydomain.com”) foreach ($vmhost in $vmhost_array) { Get-VMHostFirmware -VMHost $vmhost -BackupConfiguration -DestinationPath C:\BackupMeUp } Write-Host “Backup is completed!” The following script restores the host configuration from the folder on your Management station C:\BackupMeUp for an Array of Hosts. Make sure that you know which hosts it will restore, and that you modify this in the […]