Automation

I’m not sure why it’s been so hard to find a snippet online that gives me the ability to create a linked clone while selecting a static IP address, but it was. I ended up writing a quick function to help.

I’ve been working on a project that uses the -runasync parameter on the move-vm cmdlet. The obvious problem with running jobs asynchronously is that you lose the ability to determine the status of whatever task as soon as you submit it.

As it turns out, Docker doesn’t officially support any version of Ubuntu past Artful. This is a bit of a challenge if you want to use a state configuration manager such as Ansible to deploy Docker, or even if you want to install it manually. I was able to get this working by using the test branch of the docker release for Ubuntu Cosmic.

I’m working on a project right now that requires me to do a shared nothing cross vCenter vMotion of about 6K VMs. As you might know, cross vCenter vMotion requires you to specify the ESXi host and the Datastore your VM will live in within the target vCenter; no targeting a cluster of any kind. This brings up some interesting challenges when trying to automate the migration of such a large amount of VMs. One in particular, is the need to target the ESXi host that has the most free space. I am using the function below to do just this – hopefully it helps!

Continuing my series on provisioning VMs on workstation pro outside of the GUI, I’ve got a functional script that will create a linked clone using the vmrun command.

It allows you to specify the following options on the command line:

After posting yesterday about modifying the parent image to allow for hostname changes, I was still looking for something a little more streamlined. I remember reading about the new REST API that is available on workstation, so I wrote a little script to use the Workstation API to clone a VM.

I’ve been brushing up on a few technologies in my home lab, and have found myself using VMware workstation for some simple tasks that don’t require a whole virtualized environment. Workstation didn’t set the hostname of my Ubuntu 18.xx VMs properly after they booted. Maybe I’m a little spoiled by guest OS customization or missing something, but either way, I needed a way to quickly spin up a whole VM and have it’s hostname set correctly. It’s definitely not the cleanest, and I realize I would be better off using the Workstation Pro REST API, but I’m not there yet.

I recently encountered an issue in vSphere 5.5 where I wasn’t able to change the interface speed on an ESXi host from auto-negotiate to anything else. After a good amount of troubleshooting I was able to determine that this issue was occurring due to the fact that the NIC firmware version and driver version on a blade server was out of date. VMware has a good KB article on how to grab the firmware and driver versions that I followed. However, the problem is that even on the most modest ESXi host that isn’t running 10G to it, you’ll likely have a minimum of 4 NICs on it. This means that you’ll have to enable SSH on every host you want to check, run one command per NIC each of them (or run a one line script that loops through them, but will that really save you time..?). It doesn’t take a very large cluster for that to become a very large endeavor.

This PowerShell script will connect to a vCenter server, allow you to scan all ESXi hosts, or only hosts within a particular cluster, and output the results in object format so that you can manipulate them how you wish.

I like having documentation, but I hate creating documentation.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’m slightly lazy at times, however, my own personal preferences for what I’ll call “Effort Allocation”, are not the root of my dislike for creating documentation.  The issue really stems from the fact that creating it is very time consuming, tedious, and usually lower on the priority list.

However, sometimes it’s not you that failed to create the documentation. Consultants frequently fall into this category.

The issue I’m handling here is documenting CDP information from the perspective of ESXi hosts using PowerCLI.

Over the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of work with VMware Horizon 6. I’m not going to go into details, as VMware has done a great job doing that, plus I’m under a NDA. Suffice to say, details that have been provided suffice if you’re just looking for info.

In my company sponsored lab environment, I have HWS 1.8 deployed in feature/option parity compared to production. Deploying a second instance of HWS (perhaps a pre-release version), is challenging, due to DNS/Reverse DNS Checks that are done.

Anyways – the reason you’re probably here is to find out how to systematically modify DNS records, so here ya go!