Posts

Administering ESXi Hosts With ESXCLI using PowerCLI

There are times as a vSphere admin, you are going to want to run ESXCLI commands against multiple ESXi Hosts from a central location. This could be for configuration / administration, reporting, patching or a number of other things. Recently I have been testing different values in the /DataMover/MaxHWTransferSize advanced setting. To make life easier, I wanted a way to change multiple hosts quickly and easily. To do this, I customised a script that Luc Dekens posted as a solution to a problem someone was having that can be used to send ESXCLI commands to multiple hosts using PowerCLI and plink.exe. This slightly modified version uses a CSV file as a source containing my hosts FQDN and the username and password I will be connecting with.

Wednesday, February 10, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Deploying vCenter 7.0 via the CLI

Recently I decided it was time to add a second vCenter 7.0 Appliance to my main lab environment after the lab containing my SRM and vSphere Replication installation ceased to exist… I thought I would take the CLI route as its been a while, and thought I’d share! To begin, you need to decide what you are deploying. There are four deployment options available to you, which you can see listed below. To see the options, mount the vCenter ISO image, browse to vcsa-cli-installer\templates\install, and you will find 4 templates;

vSphere

Wednesday, January 27, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

Using Tags To Automate The Assigning Of vCenter Object Permissions

Tags are a really useful component in VMware. They can be used for all manor of things, whether it’s for storage policies, backups, identifying a group of objects or in the case of this post, managing permissions. Having a method of easily assigning permissions to singular or multiple objects in vCenter can be a great benefit to a vSphere Admin as it’s gives them greater control over the environment they manage.

Tuesday, December 1, 2020 | 7 minutes Read

Change ESXi Host Access Groups With PowerCLI

IT security, accountability and auditability are critical today. Securing vCenter Server using auditable identities, for instance via an Active Directory identity source, is likely common for most vCenter consumers. This ensures individual access can be used to audit actions back to an admin as well as provide higher security through strong password policies and the absence of a shared account credentials, such as the SSO administrator. Something that can be overlooked is the security of the ESXi hosts themselves.

Wednesday, November 4, 2020 | 2 minutes Read

SRM 8.3 Certificate Management

Following on from my last post on vSphere 7.0 certificate Management, I wanted to continue with another certificate related post. This one being Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 8.3. Like vSphere 7.0, this version seems simpler than previous versions I have used. With SRM, it’s the Appliance Certificate replacement that I am going to take you through in this blog post. Firstly log into the SRM appliance management console via https://<srm-fqdn>:5480 and select the ‘Certificates’ option on the left, followed by ‘Generate CSR’ in the top right.

vSphere
SRM

Wednesday, October 28, 2020 | 2 minutes Read

vSphere 7.0 Certificate Management

vCenter 7.0 brings many new features, one of which is a much smoother certificate management experience. There are now 4 main ‘modes’ for certificate management. These are; Fully Managed Mode, Hybrid Mode, Subordinate CA Mode and finally Full Custom Mode. There is a great article here from Bob Plankers explaining the difference between each. As mentioned in Bob’s blog, Hybrid Mode is the recommend option, and I will show you that process here in this blog.

vSphere

Tuesday, October 20, 2020 | 2 minutes Read

DFS NameSpace Issues - Migrating From FSR To DFSR Following AD Upgrade

I recently assisted a friend who had an issue with DFS Namespaces following an Active Directory Upgrade from 2008R2 to 2012R2. They were faced with not being able to access the NameSpace following the demotion of the last 2008R2 controller and promotion of the final 2012R2 controller. Upon opening the DFS NameSpace management console, the following error was displayed when selecting the required NameSpace - “The namespace cannot be queried. Element not found.”

Active-Directory

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 | 3 minutes Read

VM and vSAN Encryption

In this day an age, securing data is a must. In this post I’d like to show you two options for protecting your data; vSAN Encryption & VM Encryption. To achieve either of these you need to have connected a Key Management Server (or Cluster) to your vCenter server. Check out my previous post of how to do that - Deploying and Connecting a Key Management Server to vCenter. Lets talk though VM Encryption first.

Wednesday, September 9, 2020 | 4 minutes Read

Deploying and Connecting A Key Management Server to vCenter

Is it secure? This has to be one of the first things you consider with any technology solution or decision today. So when I was lucky enough to receive a NFR license from HyTrust for their KeyControl Key Management System I was excited to get this into my lab so I can make use of VMware’s vSAN and VM Encryption. In this post I will be going through the process of deploying a HyTrust Key Control appliance and creating a trust with vCenter. It was surprisingly straight forward and I was up and running in no time at all!

vSphere

Monday, August 24, 2020 | 3 minutes Read

Configuring ESXi for iSCSI Storage Using PowerCLI

Configuring host VMKernel adapters for iSCSI can be a time consuming process. PowerCLI can take away a lot if not all of the effort. Below is an example of using PowerCLI to create a Standard Virtual Switch (vSS), configure a VMKernel adapter, set the VLAN, enable the software iSCSI adapter (if that’s what you are using), bind it to the required network adapter and finally, add a dynamic Discovery target and rescanning the HBA’s.

Monday, August 10, 2020 | 4 minutes Read