It’s Alastair here, today I am very pleased to release the vSphere 5 AutoLab, a free tool for the VMware community. What is the AutoLab? The AutoLab is a quick easy way to build a vSphere environment for testing and learning using a single desktop or laptop PC and VMware Workstation, Fusion or ESXi. The
-> Continue reading vSphere 5 AutoLab
This came up whilst doing preparation and writing for a forthcoming exam prep book. There was an objective that required changing the location of a VM Swap file. There are two PowerCLI one-liners that can help you here. One for the cluster level, then one for the hosts. PowerCLI – Change the VM Swapfile location
-> Continue reading PowerCLI 101 – Changing the VM Swapfile Location
Video Slides
Per Mr Karlson’s site: On Wednesday April 11th, Jake Robinson (@jakerobinson) will present PowerCLI 201 on the vBrownbag, and Josh Atwell (@josh_atwell, AKA “vGinger Admin Extraordinaire“) will be hosting. If you can’t attend this Wednesday at 7PM CDT, make sure to download the podcast as it should be great. Register today! 🙂 Find us on
-> Continue reading vBrownBag – PowerCLI 201 w/ Jake Robinson
In looking around vCO, at least in the default plug-in, there was not a good variety of workflows for configuring hosts. This workflow, will set the NTP server on a host. Schema Not a very creative schema, and for good reason. Also note, it is designed to work on a single host at a time.
-> Continue reading [Orchestrator] Configure Host Time Settings
While I’ve been head down in the final edits for the vCO book (Pre-Order here), a few things happened in the vCO community. vCO Happenings vCO Training! – vcoteam.info Unattended vCO vApp deployment – vcoteam.info (manual deployment here) Getting started with vCO – PhilipSellers.com, a good getting started piece. vCO Training Videos – vmware.com More
-> Continue reading vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) Happenings
In case you missed the announcement, the barrier to entry for vCenter Orchestrator was just lowered significantly with VMware’s release of the vCO 4.2 vApp. Here, we’ll talk about installing it. Installing the vCO vApp Assumptions Basically, I’m assuming that you have an edition of vSphere that is licensed for vCenter and have downloaded both
-> Continue reading Orchestrator – Install the vCO vApp
Yes! You can! I’m not talking about using vCO to call PowerCLI scripts. As well, that’s been covered before. What I’m talking about is using PowerCLI against VMware Onyx to get vCO JavaScript (Jeorg Lew’s post on it here). First, get Onyx. I’ll wait… Have it? Excellent. Now fire it up & change the output
-> Continue reading Using PowerCLI, Onyx and Orchestrator
It’s that Cody guy again, and well he’s late to the announcement party again… Busy is as busy does, but that said, in cleaning out my feed reader I found the following Gem: Check it out here. Note the little bit at the bottom: That’s right… vCO Plug-In docs on your e-reader of choice.
There has been a lot going on in the vCO space while I’ve been head down in the book. No excuse to not post about it however. This post is all about the plug-ins: VMware posted here about the vCenter 5.x plug-in: As promised in a previous post, the vCenter Server 5.0 plug-in adds over
-> Continue reading vCenter Orchestrator – New Plug-ins for Awesome!
For those that couldn’t make it to the live show, be heartened to know that what we did was a live version of this BrownBag. If that’s not enough… brace yourself for some really awesome stuff, right here: The Slides They’re not much to look at because well, it was a demo heavy session. That
-> Continue reading PowerCLI 101 – VMworld Follow-Up
Was surprised this wasn’t here by default, but alas, out of the box vCO does not ship with a workflow to manage an NFS datastore. Thanks to the VMware communities for a bit of scripting, I was able to put one together. First we’ll break out the components, then show you how it runs. Finally
-> Continue reading vCenter Orchestrator – Add NFS Datastore
We’ll skip the reason you need tools installed. We’ll also skip a bit on the other ways to do this in PowerCLI. Rather, we’ll bring you a way to do this in Orchestrator. Note: If you’re not using vCO, you should be. Why? I covered that here. Additionally, there are some excellent vCO resources here.
-> Continue reading Automation 101 – VMware Tools with Orchestrator
As mentioned here, I have been playing around with the “nuke from orbit” bits in vCO for both Virtual Machines & their AD objects. One of the snags I hit was the fact that one of these things was not like the other. That is, the VC:VirtualMachine bits that the vCenter plug-in uses could not
-> Continue reading Automation 101 – Orchestrator & AD, Revisited
This week has me finishing up Chapter 10 or so of the upcoming vCO Book (Amazon pre-order link here). Chapter 10 is the “How to cleanse a VM with fire” or so, and one of the varied bits of clean-up you have to do after deleting a VM is to pop that sucker out of
-> Continue reading vCenter Orchestrator – Active Directory Like A Boss
If you are going to be using Orchestrator… and you should be, you are going to want to pull down and install the VIX plugin from here. Why? I hope you are strapped into your seat, and that seat is bolted to the floor because the awesome fixing to drop will hit with a force
-> Continue reading vCenter Orchestrator – VIX Plugin Installation
No story this time around, just some HBA rescanning love: PowerCLI Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostStorage -RescanAllHba vCenter Orchestrator In the vCO Client, open “Workflows” & Drill down to “Library > vCenter > Datacenter”: Right click, “Start workflow…”: Finally: “Submit” Summary Questions? Comments? Follow me on Twitter here or drop a line in the comments.
Hey… if Luc can do it, so can I, right? Turns out that yes, I can, and it’s quite easy with vCenter Orchestrator also. If you haven’t already, check out these other posts on vCO: Mass Migrations Check for Snapshots Get Started with vCO vCO BrownBag Now, our task at hand, clean up some orphaned
-> Continue reading Spring Cleaning – Orphaned VM Files with vCO
First a huge thanks to Glenn & the other authors of the PowerCLI Reference. If you don’t have a copy… you are doing yourself a disservice. Another thanks to those who attended live and continue to make these valuable for everyone. The Video ProfessionalVMware BrownBag – PowerCLI 101 w/ Glenn Sizemore from ProfessionalVMware on Vimeo.
-> Continue reading BrownBag – PowerCLI 101 Video Online
This get’s to be the third post in the “vSphere Automation 101” series or so. Not sure I want to call it a series, as that denotes some kind of commitment, and well, as we’ve discussed in prior posts, I’m lazy. Before we get too deep, here are links to the first and second parts
-> Continue reading vSphere Automation 101 – Check for Snapshots