Category: VMware
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.
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.
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…
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…
I recently ran into a problem were virtual machines running Windows 8 and Server 2012 don’t ever come back from a reboot, but rather get stuck on the Windows boot splash screen. The only work around to get the machine to boot is to manually power it off and then power it on again.
Good news is, there is a solution to this crazy weirdness; and it is documented below…
Recently I needed to find if any virtual machines had been deployed or cloned on a particular day (in order to troubleshoot a storage issue).
The Tasks & Events view in the VI client only shows the last few days of events, so if you need to get events from an older date the only way is through PowerCLI.
Here is how to do get a list of events from vCenter Server using PowerCLI…