Easily run PowerCLI commands as jobs

Posted on August 8, 2017

Overview Start-PowerCLIJobs.ps1 Running commands as jobs is pretty mainstream in Powershell. A simple “Start-Job” or “Invoke-Command -AsJob” will do the trick. However, when PowerCLI is involved it is not as straightforward. If you try to run a command that requires to be connected to a vCenter you will... [Read More]

NSX DFW rule - lost access to vCenter

Posted on July 23, 2017

I was playing with NSX recently and testing the distributed firewall (DFW) that allows for east-west firewalling, aka micro-segmentation. All was going well when I disconnected my brain for a second and added a rule “deny all all” (Yes I know…). Following that moment facepalm I obviously lost access to... [Read More]

Docker in vSphere Part 1 - Introduction

Posted on June 19, 2017

Docker in vSphere : Part 2 - Install and configure vDVS (to come) Overview I am starting a series of articles about running containers on PhotonOS in a vSphere environment with VMware’s implementation of the docker storage driver called “vSphere Docker... [Read More]

Generate a random password in Powershell

Posted on June 7, 2017

I recently needed to generate random password for an PowerCLI automation project. However, although there is a Get-Random cmdlet, it is limited to generate random numbers. Not good enough for a password, so I decided to write my own. This function allows you to choose what types of characters to... [Read More]

Automatically evacuate a host without DRS

Posted on April 27, 2017

Like many other places I believe, our non-prod hosts run on vSphere Standard instead of Enterprise Plus for its lower price. The price is great, but what isn’t is that DRS isn’t available. Which means every time a host needs to be put in maintenance mode you have to do... [Read More]

VCP6-DCV certification

Posted on February 27, 2017

After months of studying (some more than others) and running labs, I finally commited to the VCP exam and passed it succesfully. This industry-recognized certification validates that you know how to administer and troubleshoot vSphere V6 infrastructures, leveraging best practices to provide a scalable and reliable virtualization platform for... [Read More]

How to reduce the cost of your VMware infrastructure

Posted on January 27, 2017

Since the start of virtualisation as we know it, two CPU sockets configurations were the obvious choice since it allowed to increase density and run more VMs on a single server, saving in the meantime money on the other components such as RAID controllers, network cads/HBAs, chassis, disks, you name... [Read More]

Don't bother with IPs, ping VMs

Posted on January 4, 2017

One thing that we all do quite regularly is pinging servers. In a medium/big environment there can be a lot of VMs and I can’t remember all the IP addresses or even the hostnames, which is annoying when I want to ping one of them. It’s still easy to find... [Read More]

How Power management impacts ESXi performance

Posted on December 21, 2016

Recently at work we’ve been noticing erratic performance on VMs eventhough the host’s CPU wasn’t running particularly hot. In order to check if there was contention I looked at the DRS chart and discovered that the CPU, not even hitting the 50% bar was not delivering half the resources. The... [Read More]