The Software Defined Enterprise – Part 1: The Digital Workspace
The Software Defined Enterprise is becoming reality in a world that is changing around us in an ever increasing pace. Organizations which do not organize their business processes to absorb and adopt change will remain behind. Functionality is increasingly being delivered through software, where the…
PowerShell Friday: Enabling SSH with PowerCLI
Even if you have all the graphic tools that you want to manage your virtual environment, sometimes you still want to use command line utilities for maximum control or for something that isn’t really supported. There are more than one way to enable SSH on…
vCenter Server appliance 6.0 URL-based patching
With the recent release of vCenter Server appliance 6.0 Update 1b support was added for patching your vCenter server appliance, making use of a URL within your company network. Before this patch your vCenter appliance would have to make a direct connection with the internet and…
PowerShell Friday: Copying files with Copy-VMGuestFile
Every now and then you can run into the situation that you have a file wich needs to be distributed to any number of virtual machines. Now you could logon to these servers and copy the file manually and for maybe a handfull of virtual…
PowerShell Friday: Setting Reservations with PowerCLI
When configuring your virtual machines sometimes you want to set reservations. Like I said in the article about adding memory: You can go into the vSphere Client to change the configuration, but where is the fun in that? Why not do everything from the command line? And preferably…
Best Practices running VMware with NFS
Best Practices running VMware with NFS There are several ways to store your Virtual Machines that run on your VMware Cloud Backend storage. You can store them locally on internal storage or on direct attached storage (DAS). Another way is to tie your ESXi servers…
PowerShell Friday: Christmas Special
Tomorrow is Christmas, so this post is a day early, but I wanted to give you something you can play with when you’re done eating, drinking and getting merry. That’s the reason I won’t be giving you PowerShell or PowerCLI scripts that have anything to do…
PowerShell Friday: Adding Memory with PowerCLI
Just before the holidays we’ve got a small PowerCLI onliner for you. Nothing fancy, but still useful. There are times that your virtual machine doesn’t have enough memory. Yes, you can go into the vSphere Client to change the memory configuration, but where is the fun…
PowerShell Friday: Adding CPU’s with PowerCLI
Sometimes you need to add CPUs to your virtual machines. Adding CPU’s is easy on a virtual machine. Of course you can do this from the vSphere Client, where you can select the number of CPUs and the number of cores per CPU. If you…
PowerShell Friday: Snapshots
Virtual machine snapshots are useful for sysadmins, since they preserve the state of a virtual machine’s virtual disk and, optionally, virtual memory before upgrading an application for example. VM Snapshots are also taken by a lot of backup applications for VMs at the start of the backup and…
PowerShell Friday: stopping VMs
This weeks PowerShell Friday is about stopping VMs with PowerCLI. If you want to gracefully shutdown your VM, which I think you will do most of the time you are better of using Shutdown-VMGuest . This will use the VMware tools to gracefully shutdown your VM. Just as…
PowerShell Friday: Starting VMs
With PowerCLI you can manage and automate your VMware infrastructure from the command line. After you connect to vCenter you can do all kinds of nifty stuff. For example it is very easy to start virtual machines. You can use the complete name of the VM,…
Horizon View: Virtual Disk Digest?
Recently I was at a customer that is using VMware Horizon View for some time now, and one of the administrators asked me what the task “Configure Virtual Disk Digest” means. Once I explained this to him I thought why not write it down in…
PowerShell Friday: Getting Started with PowerShell and PowerCLI
PowerShell was release on November 14, 2006 and is now (or should be?) one of the major components in an admins life. If you’re just getting started on Windows or are new to the whole scripting and automation scene, this one is especially for you. I…
The Future of Virtual Networking from VMworld – Part 2
Following up on my post The Future of Virtual Networking from VMworld – Part 1 (read that before starting this one), I’m going to continue rambling on about some of the awesome future networking ideas floating around during VMworld. Disclaimer: this post is also based…
