Over the past year I have seen quite a few STS certs expire in production environments. I have been meaning to write something to scan a VCSA and report back the expiry dates of all the certs. This has posed a problem because I have to use SSH and one command needs to follow another….
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ESXi host config backup
If you look after ESXi hosts that are installed to SD cards then you will know the constant pain of replacing failed cards. You may know the pain of losing both cards in this process and having to reinstall from scratch. ESXi hosts are not the hardest thing to rebuild but for me. its a…
vCenter/VCSA Cert checking
If you look after a vCenter or VCSA at some point you are going to have the certificates expire on you. And if you look after a lot of vCenter servers then expiring Certs are a constant headache that pops up just at the time that is most inconvenient. VMWare detail that only in some…
Very fast orphan finder
Some thing every VMWare admin will end up doing at some point is orpahen file hunting. That fun task of hunting down unused VM disks hopefully before your datastore is out of space. Working for a cloud provider, wasted space is always a problem and RVTools has been my tool of choice for years. RVTools…
Powershell Splatting
This post will explain how to splat in Powershell. Splatting is basically using an array or a hash table as the attributes of a command.As with most things in Powershell, its best demonstrated by an example or two. Example 1 In my day job I have an ESXi build script, part of that is to…
Change NetApp FC ports to Ethernet
I was recently in a situation at work when I needed to stop work on a NetApp AFF redeploy and mount the SAN so some of its original data could be recovered. Now the SAN used Fiber Channel in its old location and its new location was Ethernet. At this point I have re-IPed the…
VMWare tasks
Some thing I always send a lot of time doing is looking for old tasks in vCenter. When using the web client or even Powershell you get a list of active tasks and some old ones before they disappear. You can go back through the Event list but sometimes you need to see the tasks….
VCSA restore from backup
In this post I will detail the steps required to restore a VCSA from a file level backup. Hopefully this will be a post no one will ever need. But if you do find your self in a situation that requires a restore from backup, then I hope this post helps. This is a list…
VM clone script
This is a VM clone/”backup” script that I use in my home lab. I schedule this script to make a clone of important VMs (works with vCenter) and clones them to another datastore. Obveusly this is not a proper backup but if I make a config change or lose a datastore then this will (and…
File deletion scripts
I get asked quite alot at work to monitor folders and delete files older then x days or stop them growing out of control. These folders are normaly FTP backups of things that do not age out. Like config backups (NSX im looking at you). There are a couple of ways to do this. The…