Ramblings about randomness I’ve found on the internets this week – you know, like this!
New Release of PowerCLI is out.
Although it’s only a minor release we still have some new features packed into the 6.5.3 release of PowerCLI which hit the shelves this week! One of the most prominent is the addition of cmdlets/modules for the NSX-T functionality (VMware’s multi-hypervisor/multi-cloud version of NSX) which was announced just this past VMworld. Aside from that, and in my opinion a very useful feature is the addition of a Create method which can be used with some of the services VMware provides. The link below shows how it can be used to actually generate a custom specification for creating a new VM – a cool feature that can save tons of troubleshooting and coding time for sure. You can see more features and read all about the release in Kyle Ruddy’s blog over at vmware.com.
DRaaS with Scale Computing’s Cloud Unity!
I’ve been following Scale Computing’s story for quite some time now and have always loved their message. They have always catered to the small customers – those customers that simply just need to run VMs and that’s it – no fancy bells and whistles, no advanced settings to screw things up – just plug their boxes in and go! Backup however always seemed to be absent from their KVM forked solution though – to combat this they have introduced replication to their boxes, allowing VMs to be replicated between buildings, locations, etc in order to provide DR. With this past Tech Field Day they went into more detail on how they are taking this replication functionality and leveraging nested hypervisors within Google Cloud to run their HC3 solution – essentially providing DRaaS to their customers! Matt Crape, fellow Canadian was at the event – check out his blog here to learn more. It’s funny, getting down to his final thoughts he mentions that Scale actually had two fires in their own offices – nothing like leading by example!
Pam_tally2 and DiscoPosse
Eric Wright has written a small but great article outlining how to reset your lockout attempts within ESXi this week! Honestly, there can’t be enough information around this on the internets as I’m always finding myself googling syntax to do this on different servers that I’ve forgotten about and locked myself out of. He makes a great point near the end about using ssh keys in order to ensure you don’t fall victim to getting those administrative type users locked out! Something that I probably should, but just have never dedicated the time to do! Anyways, give Eric’s post a read and keep a security mindset!
Um, you want a restore of what? Never heard of it!
There was a bit of discussion in the Veeam Vanguard Slack channels this week in regards to identifying those VMs which don’t have tags assigned to them. You see, a lot of people use the vSphere tagging functionality as a means for populating the VMs which are included in their Veeam jobs – which is great, but what about those rogue VMs that get created without a tag – how do we ensure we still get a backup of those? Because you know someone is going to come up to you someday and ask for a restore of a VM which you had no idea existed – this is the world we live in. Well, Andreas Lesslhumer figured out his own way around this – have a script run which identifies VMs in your environment which are not tagged – then simply assign a tag to them and create a job in Veeam to back those VMs up with said newly assigned tag! You can get his code here. A nifty little way to ensure you are backing up everything you need to!
vSphere Management Assistant Replacement
I’m not sure how many people still use the vSphere Management Assistant – or vMA. What I do know is that I still have some scripts that I have written long ago running on ours. They are working and doing their job so I’ve never seen the need to migrate them to anything else. I’m sure I could do the same work with PowerCLI or the vCLI but if its not broken why fix it right? Well, that low priority migration is going to have to get bumped up at some point because VMware says they will no longer be releasing the vMA in future versions of vSphere. So what to do? Rescript all your scripts? Migrate to a new language? Why not keep your vMA by creating your own? Edward Haletky has a detailed post here where he gives you links and instructions on how to create a replacement vMA all on your own with a ton (even more so than the original vMA) of resources and hooks! Be sure to give it a read!
I hate to complain but c’est quoi, ce bordel?
Yes I know it’s only a week. Yes I know I shouldn’t jump to conclusions! Yes, I know the internets will banish me for expressing my frustrations! But hey, it’s my blog and my hockey rant! My precious Habs this year have not had the greatest start! It’s early in the season they say! Have some patience they say! Let the players figure it out, there’s new faces on the team they say! The fact of the matter is for the past few years the Habs have had some great starts to the season – and that has certainly offset some of their terrible finishes – allowing them to still make the postseason! Well, this year we are 1-3 thus far – not the usual “great” start! What haunts me more is the fact that we have scored 5 goals in those 4 games – 5 – FIVE! Honestly, we have the best goalie in the world on our team – if you can get 3 goals a game we are on the good side of the odds of winning! Fact is, Habs need more offense! Certainly, we are getting the shots – but who really cares unless they start going in the net! Habs need to get someone to do that, whether it’s from within or from another team! Their window of youngness and Carey Priceness is shortening! K – Rant done!
