VSphere

Getting Started With Packer to Create vSphere Templates – Part 2 - Answer Files and Scripts

Welcome to part 2 of my Getting Started with Packer series, if you missed part 1, you can find it here. In part 2, we will take a look through an important part of creating your vSphere templates; Answer Files and scripts. Firstly, we will be looking at a couple of example scripts that can be used to configure your operating system before its turned into your template. We will then move on to answer files that allow an automated, non user prompting installation of your operating system. These answer files provide configuration details during the operating system installation.

Tuesday, June 22, 2021 | 8 minutes Read

Getting Started With Packer to Create vSphere Templates - Part 1

Virtual Machines Templates, why? Templates are a great way to achieve consistent, repeatable and fast virtual machine (VM) deployments, be it an on-premise vSphere environment or cloud based environment. Having up to date VM templates for each of the operating systems you use, is key to being able to deploy infrastructure quickly and easily across multiple platforms. In this series of blog posts, I will be focusing on deploying virtual machine templates in vSphere, specifically vSphere 7, using a product called Packer by HashiCorp. Packer is an Infrastructure as Code tool specifically for template management.

Tuesday, June 15, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Enabling Native KMS in vSphere 7.0 Update 2

Some time back I wrote about setting up and enabling a HyTrust Key Management setup for vSphere to make use of VM and vSAN encryption. Following the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 2, VMware have introduced native key management capabilities! This is a great feature as you no longer require a potentially expensive separate key management solution to make use of vSphere’s encryption offerings. Lets take a look at this new capability by heading over to the Key Providers menu on your vCenter object, and selecting ‘Add Native Key Provider’:

Thursday, March 25, 2021 | 2 minutes Read

Get, Set and Remove Perennial Reservations Using PowerShell Functions

Having recently had to do some work with RDM perennial reservations I looked into ways to make this less of a manual headache. There are plenty of examples out there for doing this, which I took as a basis to make a PowerShell function. If anything it was a great way to refresh my PowerShell skills and an opportunity to learn some new skills. Note: Although this has been tested in my environment, please make sure you test it appropriately before running against a production environment!

Tuesday, March 9, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

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

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

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