Alternative to VDS Health Check

Posted 2 CommentsPosted in Script

If you have a large environment or a lot of VLANs you know that running with VDS Health check on, is not an option. This is due to the way VDS Health check works. It will sent out one packet per uplink per VLAN. Meaning if you have two uplinks and 20 VLAN, it will send out a total of 40 packets for that one host. Which is not that bad, but now scale it up to the kind of people which usually have and need the distributed switch and the number of VLANs is likely to be triple digit […]

Using Log Insight query API with Powershell

Posted 2 CommentsPosted in Log Insight

Log Insight is such an underrated tool. As a consultant I use it all the time, it makes it simple and fast to find issues and solutions. Frankly speaking any VMware shop not running Log Insight is letting there company down. There is multiple ways to get insight out of Log Insight. You can use the GUI; setup webhooks for third party intergration; get it to send you an email; send alerts to vRops or use the Log Insight API. The API is split into two, an ingestion API and a query API. Today I am going to show you […]

Part 2: SuperMicro SuperServer E300-8D deep dive

Posted 19 CommentsPosted in Hardware

 TOC Part 1: The NUC killer: SuperMicro SuperServer E300-8D Part 2: SuperMicro SuperServer E300-8D deep dive Part 3: SuperMicro SuperServer E300-8D 2 years later Part 2: SuperMicro SuperServer E300-8D deep dive In the last post, I wrote about the SuperMicro SuperServer E300-8D in comparison to Intels NUC series, but also covered networking and the reason for me buying into SuperMicro over NUC. In this next part of the serie. I am going to dig into the E300-8D’s technical specifications, show case its good and bad sides and talk about noise and power consumption. A closer look at E300-8D from the […]

SDRS VM settings always set to fullyautomated with New-VM cmdlet

Posted Leave a commentPosted in Script

New-VM cmdlet Came across an issue when doing deployment of VMs using the PowerCli cmdlet New-VM. If not specified and deployed into a datastore cluster, SDRS behavior will always be set to automated. Even if the datastore clusters default setting is set to something else. It seems weird to bypass the datastore clusters default settings and per default just set it to automated, but that is just how it is at the moment. Consider this to be a request to change default behaviour of the cmdlet, to always set the SDRS setting of the VM to default unless otherwise specified. […]

Delete claimrules via PowerCLI

Posted Leave a commentPosted in ESXi, Script

Had to mask storage in an older environment. As soon as that was done and storage were removed, then the clean up starts. I could have done all this by hand, but where is the fun in that. Instead I created this little script below which removes all claimrules with a rule number greater than 101 and lower than 65535. Of course this should go without saying. You need to know what you are doing and that there is no claimrules between 101-65535 that is crucial to your environment. Deleting claimrules like this shouldn’t be taking lightly. Well, I had […]

Deploy appliances via PowerCLI

Posted Leave a commentPosted in Script

Needed to deploy some appliances. I could have done that via a client, but it some what cumbersome and requires you to sit a wait for every step. Why not deploy appliances via Powercli? It’s easy, fast and requires only a few lines of commands. The PowerCli cmdlet is called “Import-VApp”. The cmdlet lets you specify fields like Source, Name and OvfConfiguration. The tricky part here is to know which OvfConfiguration parameters are needed. An OVA file is just a zip file with the vmdk and configuration files in it. It can simply be opened with a tool which supports […]

esx.problem.net.vmknic.ip.duplicate – Hunting for MAC

Posted Leave a commentPosted in Log Insight, Script

Log Insight is a very powerful tool to monitor your environments health status. One of my favorite dashboards to is the “General – Problems” dashboard, which is part of the  “VMware – vSphere” content pack. It comes with Log Insight per default. Because there you can get a great overview of any problems that might be in your vSphere environment. One of the problems you might see is the “esx.problem.net.vmknic.ip.duplicate” or as it can be seen in the pie chart “net.vmknic.ip.duplicate”. This problem basically tells you there’s an misconfiguration in your environment. Two VMK nics have the same IP address […]

vCenter IDM overview

Posted Leave 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 […]

Validate SSL expiration date

Posted Leave a commentPosted in Script

Every x years ssl certificates need to be renew for the vSphere infrastructure. So in order to do this I needed a way to validate SSL expiration date. Well the thing is I don’t know an automated way of doing this. I started by look around google to see if there wasn’t a smart guy who had already done something like this and it turns out there is, so please put your hands together for Vadims Podans and is blog post Test remote web server SSL certificate. With credit due, I’ll continue with my small contribution. How to validate SSL expiration date What Vadims have […]

Maximum vDS ports per host

Posted 2 CommentsPosted in Script

First of all its been awhile since my laste port and for that I apologize. Maximum vDS ports per host Some settings are just left default, maybe because it seems to be of no use/harm, maybe because it seems sufficient and some are just left default as the consequences of changing them are unknown. Well I guess this is just one of the problems where all of the above fit right in. You may know that there are some limitations of whats supported by different vSphere components – and this is were the problem in question comes to play. When you […]