With vSphere 5.1 the command line interface esxcli has introduced many new features. The esxcli is a complete set of commands that you can use to automate you environment or to perform advanced tasks like lun masking. I have created and printed a mindmap to navigate through the namespaces more quickly
ESXCLI has 10 namespaces whose names are self-explaining:Read More »ESXi 5.1 - ESXCLI Command Mindmap
When you select Debian or Ubuntu as Operating System during the creation of virtual machines the wizard automatically selects E1000 as virtual network adapter. To get better network performance it is a best practice to change this to vmxnet3. But what if the virtual machine is already installed and running? The Adapter Type is grayed out, even when the virtual machine is powered off. How to change the Adapter Type later?Read More »Migrate E1000 Adapter to vmxnet3 with Linux Virtual Machines
As you might know it is a VMware best practice to keep snapshots for more than 24-72 hours. To monitor aged snapshots using Nagios i created a perl script that checks the whole vCenter for snapshots. The script throws a warning because i think this is still not a critical event. You can easily change the behavior by changing the exit code to 2.
I set the allowed age to 3 days, based on VMware KB1025279. You can change the maximum allowed age to whatever you want by changing the subroutine check_age.
You can use this script as source for Nagios. There is also a multiple line output which allows you to see the virtual machine that caused the warning event.Read More »Nagios Check: VMware Virtual Machine Snapshot Age
If you are using the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) on a daily bases you might want to simplify the login process. Public Key authentication is an authentication method that relies on a generated public/private keypair and enables the login without entering a password.
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While doing some patchmanagement I faced an issue with the current Windows Management Framework 3.0 (WMF) and the VMware vSphere Update Manager PowerCLI 5.1. Everytime when i invoked one of the VMware.VumAutomation cmdlets the PowerShell crashed with an StackOverflowException:
Process is terminated due to StackOverflowException.
I couldn't locate the root cause, so i started to narrow down the problem with different operating system. After testing various systems i noticed that the problem only appears on Windows 7 Systems with WMF3 installed manually and Windows 8 Systems where WMF3 is installed by default.Read More »StackOverflowException with Update Manager PowerCLI and WMF v3
In this post i am going to give a quick startup guide to the new version of PowerCLI 5.1 with the Windows Management Framework 3.0, which is available with Windows 8. Both are recently published releases of the great PowerShell scripting engine that every VMware admin should know. First i am going to give a quick guide how to set up and configure your environment. Later i am going to show the new features of PowerCLI 5.1 and PowerShell 3.0.Read More »Getting Started with PowerCLI 5.1 and PowerShell 3.0