PowerCLI: Reporting the duration of Snapshots

One of our customers had a problem with VMs losing network connectivity while the backup was running. Their backup solution was based on VMware snapshots. After the end-users complained about a service not being responsive they investigated and found out that during the creation of the snapshot they lose the pings.

In response they wanted to check how long the snapshots take on all of their VMs. Even though their environment was not very big, it would have been very tedious to gather this information manually. PowerCLI to the rescue!

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PowerCLI: Checking ESXi Hosts Advanced Settings against VMware’s default

Over the years and releases from VMware the best practices change sometimes. In the early days we had to set a lot of advanced settings to get a desired feature to run as it should or to make the VMware Admin’s life a little easier.

The thing about these settings is that you should check them with every release. Are they still required? Have they been deprecated? Is the behaviour still the same when they get set?

PowerCLI: Adding a disk to a VM

Recently I stumbled upon a stubborn vSphere Client at a customer. It just would not let me add a disk a VM. The error message was very generic (and was in the end fixed with a reboot) so I had to find a alternative: Here comes PowerCLI.

Setting up a greenfield vSAN cluster on 6.5 Update 1

Recently I had the pleasure of doing a vSAN project for one of our customers. The project scale was very small but nonetheless very interesting.

The project scope was:

• 4 HPE ProLiant DL 380 Gen9 Servers
  • Each had 6 SSDs (2x Cache @ 400 GB, 4x Capacity @ 1.92 TB)
• 1 vCenter Server Appliance
• Migration of VMs from existing environment (vSphere 5.5 on Gen6 hardware)

Getting Started with Clarity UI from VMware

As you know when you read my blog, I like to develop and script a lot of things. One things that was always hard for me was the design of the user interface. The latest release of my ESXi staging appliance is a good example of that. My design is functional but far from pretty.

PowerCLI: Find and disconnect CD Drives on your VMs

One of the things that regularly pops up in our health checks in VMware environments are connected CD Drives that prevent DRS from functioning properly or prevents a host from entering maintenance mode when doing thing like patching.

In large environments it can get very tedious to disconnect all those drives manually. With PowerCLI it is just one line.

VMware releases 6.5 Update 1

A couple of days ago VMware released version 6.5 Update 1 for some of their products:

• vCenter Server: Link
• ESXi: Link, Link to HPE Custom Image
• Site Recovery Manager (SRM): Link

I was waiting for Update 1 of the vSphere Stack for a while now, and the List of bugfixes has quite a few entries with critical bug fixes.