• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

  • Home
  • Unexplored Territory Podcast
  • HA Deepdive
  • ESXTOP
  • Stickers/Shirts
  • Privacy Policy
  • About
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Archives for 2009

Alan Renouf’s, the powershell guru, Daily Report

Duncan Epping · Jul 16, 2009 ·

Alan Renouf is definitely on of the most active bloggers when we are talking about Powershell/PowerCLI. His posts are always educational and of a high quality. I love the one-liners but nothing, absolutely nothing, beats this awesome Daily Report script that Alan has just published. I’m not going to repost his full article because I think all of you should visit Alan’s website and give him feedback on the script so he can improve it.

There is a configurable section at the start of the script where you can set how many days old you would like your snapshots to be allowed in your infrastructure, anything over this will show in the report, it will even resolve the name ( the machine running the script must be part of an Active Directory Domain) so that you can forward this email on to them and ask them if they still need the snapshot.

The outcome of the script also contains:

  • Datastores that have less than x% free space
  • VMs which have been created in the last x days and who created these
  • VMs which have been deleted and who deleted them
  • Any Virtual Center Events which have been logged during the given timeframe
  • Any VM’s which have no VMtools installed
  • The state of all VMware services on the vCenter server
  • Any Windows events from the Virtual center server which are related to VMware
  • Any VMs which have CD-Rom or Floppy Drive’s connected
  • Any hosts in Maintenance Mode
  • Any Hosts in a disconnected state

Schedule it and email it to your helpdesk on a daily base and let them check the outcome and archive it. It might come in handy sometime when you need to troubleshoot your environment, believe me it will… Thanks Alan, keep it up.

vSphere vCenter Update Manager on Windows 2008 32/64BIT?

Duncan Epping · Jul 15, 2009 ·

According to page 15 of the the vSphere compatibility matrix guide VMware vCenter Update Manager isn’t supported on Windows 2008 32 and 64 bit. I just received an email from one of my colleagues stating that this is incorrect. The document will be updated soon but for now take my word on it VUM is supported on Windows 2008 32 and 64 bit!

NetApp’s vSphere best practices and EMC’s SRM in a can

Duncan Epping · Jul 15, 2009 ·

This week both NetApp and EMC released updated versions of documents I highly recommend to everyone interested in virtualization! Now some might think why would I want to read a NetApp document when we are an EMC shop.! Or why would I want to read an EMC document when my environment is hosted on a NetApp FAS3050. The answer is simple, although both documents contain vendor specific information there’s more to be learned from these documents because the focus is VMware products. No marketing nonsense, just the good stuff!

NetApp’s guide dives in to the basics of multipathing for instance. Especially the section on iSCSI/NFS is useful, how do I setup multiple VMkernels for load balancing and are the pros and cons. EMC’s SRM and Celerra guide includes a full how to set this up. Not only the EMC side but also the VMware SRM side of it. Like I said both documents are highly recommended!

  • TR-3749: vSphere on NetApp Storage Best Practices
  • EMC Celerra VSA and VMware SRM setup and configurations guide

VMware vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) Patch 01

Duncan Epping · Jul 14, 2009 ·

For those running vMA (previously known as VIMA) patch 01 has just been released. You can find all the details in this KB article. Updating the appliance when the proxy has been set up can be done on the command line by typing the following command:

sudo vima-update update

ESXi and the update manager part II

Duncan Epping · Jul 14, 2009 ·

A couple of days ago I posted about Update Manager wanting to install updates regarding the Nexus while I did not have the Nexus installed. I’ve rebuild my entire test environment with the latest(GA) build and noticed that I’m not experiencing these issues anymore. Now I’ve either had an outdated version of VUM, a screwed up database or I was sleeping when I wanted to apply the patches. Normally I take screenshots when things like this happen but because I did not have much time I did not take them.

I reinstalled my test environment again this morning and again I’m not able to reproduce it. The patch only installs when the Cisco Nexus 1000v is installed. It seems like my observation was wrong, I do however think it’s a smart thing not trust on technology for 100%, check your baseline before you apply it.

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 30
  • Page 31
  • Page 32
  • Page 33
  • Page 34
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 85
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

About the Author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist and Distinguished Engineering Architect at Broadcom. Besides writing on Yellow-Bricks, Duncan is the co-author of the vSAN Deep Dive and the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book series. Duncan is also the host of the Unexplored Territory Podcast.

Follow Us

  • X
  • Spotify
  • RSS Feed
  • LinkedIn

Recommended Book(s)

Also visit!

For the Dutch-speaking audience, make sure to visit RunNerd.nl to follow my running adventure, read shoe/gear/race reviews, and more!

Do you like Hardcore-Punk music? Follow my Spotify Playlist!

Do you like 80s music? I got you covered!

Copyright Yellow-Bricks.com © 2026 · Log in