Tag: VMware

17th October 2016 · Luca Sturlese

Late last week, VMware and AWS announced a partnership where by VMware workloads will be able to run on AWS. The way it works is as you request the service, ESX hosts and a vCenter get spooled up and configured on bare-metal hardware within AWS datacentres.

This vCenter then connects to your existing environment and will allow for live vMotion of VMs between your on premise and the AWS cloud!

This is potentially a big shift in how companies will consume cloud services as essentially no re-architecture of applications is required to leverage the benefits of cloud – on demand, as-a-service model. ESX hosts and storage essentially become “unlimited” capacity, as at any moment you have the ability to request more resources! No lead times, no capital expenditure.

This is really cool and I think will make a big impact, especially for larger organisations. For more information check out the VMware Cloud on AWS website.

26th June 2016 · Luca Sturlese

The PowerShell execution policy is a good feature from a security perspective, but in most cases it is just plain annoying, especially when running scripts from Group Policy, Task Scheduler, or some other sort of remote mechanism. This article shows you how to bypass the PowerShell execution policy on a machine so that you can run your script on a system irrespective of what execution policy is set.

Read More “Bypass the PowerShell Execution Policy”

7th June 2016 · Luca Sturlese

Recently I needed to configure all of our 50 or so ESXi hosts to forward SNMP traps to our corporate monitoring solution. This meant enabling and configuring SNMP on each of the hosts. Naturally, I wrote a script for this as 50 hosts is way too many to do manually.

This article shows you how configure SNMP on an ESXi host manually, via PowerCLI and via host profiles.

Read More “How To – Configure SNMP on an ESXi Host”

14th November 2015 · Luca Sturlese

If you have ever managed a VMware environment that contains virtual machines with RDM (Raw Device Mapping) disks then you will know it is a pain to track and manage RDMs, especially when trying to distinguish which VM has a specific RDM disk attached or if the RDM is still attached to a VM. You will also know that it is nearly impossible to find an RDM (and the corresponding VM) based on RDM’s LUN ID.

To ease the management burden of RDMs, I have written a script to search for a specific RDM by LUN ID or alternatively to get a list of all RDMs, their LUN ID, Capacity, Disk Identifier and the VM they are attached to. Below is the script and all of the details you need to get it up and running in your environment…

Read More “Searching for RDM Disks using PowerCLI”

6th September 2015 · Luca Sturlese

To coincide with my new PowerShell Logging Module, I have also updated my PowerCLI Script Template to now use the PSLogging module as opposed to my original PowerShell_Logging function library.

This template is based on my PowerShell Script Template Version 2, but has been modified for use with PowerCLI so that you can easily create scripts and solutions to automate your VMware world!

Below is everything you need to know on the PowerCLI template, as well as the template itself…

Read More “PowerCLI Script Template v2”

6th September 2015 · Luca Sturlese

Sometime back in 2011 when I first started using PowerShell, I developed some standard functions to handle the creating and management of log files for my PowerShell scripts. These functions were stored in a file called Logging_Functions.ps1 and I would simply dot source them into my script to be able to use them.

I posted them on 9to5IT PowerShell: How to easily create log files for your scripts and since then, to my surprise, they have been well received by many people, and hence the post has become quite a popular one. Recently one of the users emailed me and made a suggestion to convert them into a PowerShell Module.

That got me thinking…. so I have made a number of improvements to the PowerShell logging functions and have now made them available as a PowerShell Logging module. Available right here, below….

Read More “PowerShell Logging v2 – Easily create log files”