Category: Script

vRops API – Working with Alerts

Posted Michael Ryom2 CommentsPosted in Script, vRops

This is another example and use case for using the vRops API to make some tasks easier. Let me set the scene. You have a large environment with maybe a 1000 datastores.  Quite a few alerts in vRops for datastores that are full or about to run full. Like the pro you are, you have of course datastore clusters in use. Like so many others the storage team uses an automated storage tiering, which forces us to disable some SDRS stuff. For many that means that SDRS is a manual task which can be run in order to distribute the […]

How to change VMDK geometry

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Ravello, Script, vRops

I recently ran into an issue were I needed to change the geometry of some VMDK files – I will do a seperate blog post on where and why later. For now I will just focus on how to change VMDK geometry. A VMDK is just a file with some descriptional data and the actually binary data of the VMDK. Think of it as a virtual harddisk. It adheres to the same physical characteristics and there for the physical characteristics are also part of a VMDK file. Normally you won’t need to change the geometry of a VMDK – I this case […]

OVFtool wrapper for vCloud Air

Posted Michael Ryom4 CommentsPosted in Script, vCloud Air

Lately I’ve started using vCloud Air. That’s is a new experience for me, being used to using the fat client for a vSphere environment – The vCloud Air is a different experience, not bad, just other ways to get the normal day-to-day operations to work. One of the things I have played with is OVFtool, which is a command-line tool to upload ISOs and VMs to vCloud Air. Working with long command-line strings can be a bit annoying, as small typos quickly breaks things and it can be hard to spot the single digit error somewhere in the long text […]

Creating Excel spreadsheet with PowerShell

Posted Michael Ryom1 CommentPosted in Script

If you have followed this blog from the beginning, you would have seen that I have done things with PowerShell and Excel in the past. Like in Enclosure Overview, where I draw blade enclosures, with blades in them, name them and color code them according to the cluster they are in. This was done to give a clear understanding of how clusters where spread out through the data center. This is a great way to visualize fault domains(in this case sites/enclosures) and how they are utilized. Another example is my blog post about pxe boot, called Yet another ESXi pxe […]

vCenter IDM overview

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Script, VMware

Dealing with user rights in vCenter isn’t an easy task. Data is not readily available from the given users perspective, instead one have to look through the different rolls, to see what rights the user will end up with, a task that can be hard to complete or do compliance check on. vCenter IDM has always been hard. This has made me turn to the trusted tools of PowerCli, where the answer can quickly be found or data be exported to csv, for later use with your favorite spreadsheet. This post is about the powercli script that I use to […]

Poor man’s event search

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Script, VMware

If you ever tried to search through task and events in the vSphere client, you know this can take quite some time, dependent on your environment size and how much is going on in the vCenter. For that reason and because you “only” get the last 1000 events, it can be beneficial to be able to do an event search. When I have a challenge like this I jump to use the trusted tools of PowerCli. For this task the good folks at VMware has make a cmdlet called Get-ViEvent. If you simply run it you will get a long […]

My failures into patch management

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Script

This is not my usual problem solving blog post, this is about my failures into patch management – Meaning that I failed! This is my thoughts and some of the work I have done in order to get a better understanding of the hardware’s firmware and driver versions – Which should have ended up in being a complete way of gaining control over firmware and drivers versions, in order to insure that firmware and driver are aligned across the datacenter. Going back around four years I was working with around ten ESXi hosts and 300 VMs or so. Going back […]

Exploring vRops Internal API

Posted Michael Ryom2 CommentsPosted in Script, vRops

Continuing from my last blog post I will show you some more of vRops API capabilities, this time it vRops Internal API. So if your new to the vRops API or just need some more background of how to use it please start by reading my previous blog post vRops API consumed with Powershell   First a disclaimer: This is not supported by VMware! I post this purely for educational purpose. This should NOT be used for production. Again THIS IS NOT SUPPORTED.   Exploring vRops Internal API This time I’m going to show vRops private / unsupported API, which […]

vRops API consumed with Powershell

Posted Michael Ryom8 CommentsPosted in Script, Vcops, vRops

vRops have been out for sometime now, and a lot of new features have been added, not to talk about a whole new user interface experience. The future looks bright for vRops. Another great feature is a REST / RESTful api. This what I’m going to talk a bit about, and more so show vRops API consumed with Powershell. First thing to know is how to get a hold of the vRops API and the documentation for it, and if you should wish to use it, there’s also a java and python client. I prefer to use a plugin for Firefox […]

How I stopped worrying and love vShield Endpoint

Posted Michael Ryom3 CommentsPosted in Script, VMware

Antivirus gone bad with a little help from vShield Endpoint This was all the rage some years ago, offloading antivirus operation from the OS to the hypervisor with a little help from vShield Endpoint. To be honest I really like the idea. But after what I went through I would think twice before doing it again. Not saying it’s a bad solution, but the way the vendor implemented their own solution begs for questioning, why on earth?! Don’t they even know their own solution. The history goes… Like I said offloading antivirus with vShield Endpoint and scanning all vms at the […]