As part of a recent automation workflow, I had cause to configure NTP on ESXi hosts. I honestly thought this would be easier than it was, but a couple of issues led me to “roll my own” function which I’m sharing here.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Native TAR File Extraction with PowerShell
That’s right, tar-ball 😉 On one of my projects recently, I had cause to extract a .tar.gz file during the automation process. If you are in this scenario there are potentially a couple of options around this which I’ll cover off. However, I wanted a simple, native function with no dependencies, so keep reading toContinue reading “Native TAR File Extraction with PowerShell”
Building ISO Files with PowerShell 7
A function that’s been part of my toolkit for a long time is New-ISOFile by Chris Wu. This excellent little function allowed you to build an ISO file directly from PowerShell, even a bootable one. I came to use it recently on an automation project with PowerShell 7 and discovered there was some compatibility issueContinue reading “Building ISO Files with PowerShell 7”
ESXi & The Big MAC Mystery
A scripting “opportunity” came up this week. Apparently ESXi assigns a virtual (or “shadow”) MAC address to each of its physical adapters, over and above the native physical MAC. The request was to report on all of these MACs across a large number of hosts. Read on to see how this resulted in the Get-esxiShadowMACContinue reading “ESXi & The Big MAC Mystery”
Bulk Uplink Configuration on Distributed Switches
Recently, as part of some work to install new physical adapters into our ESXi hosts, I was asked to look at some automation around uplink failover order. If you ever have to change these, it can be somewhat tedious, especially if you have lots of port groups, switches and vCenters. Since I’ve been slacking onContinue reading “Bulk Uplink Configuration on Distributed Switches”
HTTP Multipart Forms and on the Fly Compression in PowerShell.
I recently did some work with the vRealize Operations Manager REST API using PowerShell. Part of the work was to do with policy export and import, which raised 2 interesting challenges from a PowerShell point of view: Firstly, HTTP mutlipart form data. We use an HTTP request to send a file to the API, easyContinue reading “HTTP Multipart Forms and on the Fly Compression in PowerShell.”
VUMXtra 1.1 Update
This is just a quick post to mention that there’s a new VUMXtra 1.1 module now available. It’s mostly numerous small changes to satisfy my OCD. If I’m being honest, 1.0 was written “at pace” to get something functional and possibly ignored a lot of best practices. Using a bit of downtime over the ChristmasContinue reading “VUMXtra 1.1 Update”
PowerShell Performance Tuning
Performance tuning, everybody loves that. Maybe you got your car remapped for more power. Maybe you overclocked your CPU for some more GHz. Maybe you want to shave a few milliseconds off your PowerShell execution time but don’t know where to start. Today on The Dot Source, we’ll discuss benchmarking your current code, then lookingContinue reading “PowerShell Performance Tuning”
VUM Xtra Module: Extended VUM Automation with the VC Integrity API
Anyone who has been asked to automate vSphere Update Manager processes will know that the CMDlets included within PowerCLI are somewhat sparse. The current functionality focuses mainly around patch baselines and not much else. If you want to automate ESXi images, image baselines or baseline groups, you’re out of luck……until now 🙂
