I had a question about a limit a customer was hitting with the VM notes using the vSphere (H5) Client. They noticed that whenever they got around ~260 or so characters, they could not add any characters beyond that unless they deleted some. After talking to an engineer within VMware I found out that this is indeed the limit for the vSphere Client today. Through the API, and of course also PowerCLI, you can go beyond the 255 if needed. Also with the Web Client you could do this. If you are hitting this issue, please be aware that it is a known issue and VMware is looking to resolve it hopefully soon.
powerCLI
PowerCLI for OSX is out!
I am not a big PowerCLI user, primary reason being that I don’t even have a Windows box available. My main laptop is a macbook, and I don’t run Windows anywhere. Yesterday PowerCLI 10.0.0 was released, which includes support for OSX! Before you can install PowerCLI of course you would need to have Powershell running, I tried different ways as described here, but the Homebrew method threw an error (see below) so I used the direct download option and just installed the package, which worked fine.
failed command: /usr/bin/sudo -E -- /usr/sbin/installer -pkg /usr/local/Caskroom/powershell/6.0.1/powershell-6.0.1-osx.10.12-x64.pkg -target
When installed you simply open a terminal and type “pwsh”. Weird thing is that many blogs seem to state that you type “powershell”, but for me that doesn’t work either. So either recently something changed, or people have been blatantly copying procedures from the same source, didn’t bother checking why… waiting for Alan to comment. Then you type the following in the Powershell to get the PowerCLI module installed:
Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -Scope CurrentUser
What may be useful to change is the certificate handling. As mentioned by Kyle in this blog, the way PowerCLI handles certificate issues has changed, so go to his blog to figure out how to disable it. I will now go explore some of the vSAN PowerCLI cmdlets, haven’t done anything in ages with PowerCLI, so this will be a day with me yelling at the monitor why stuff doesn’t work and then realizing I made a stupid typo.
Automating vCloud Director Resiliency whitepaper released
About a year ago I wrote a whitepaper about vCloud Director resiliency, or better said I developed a disaster recovery solution for vCloud Director. This solution allows you to fail-over vCloud Director workloads between sites in the case of a failure. Immediately after it was published various projects started to implement this solution. As part of our internal project our PowerCLI guru’s Aidan Dalgleish and Alan Renouf started looking in to automating the solution. Those who read the initial case study probably have seen the manual steps required for a fail-over, those who haven’t read this white paper first…
The manual steps in the vCloud Director Resiliency whitepaper is exactly what Alan and Aidan addressed. So if you are interested in implementing this solution then it is useful to read this paper new white paper about Automating vCloud Director Resiliency as well. Nice work Alan and Aidan!
Automating ESXi host level changes without opening SSH
I have been asked by many if it is possible automating ESXi host level changes without opening SSH. In many organizations people are prohibited to open SSH however they do have the need to make certain changes on a host level. One of those changes for instance is in a stretched cluster environment where “disk.terminateVMOnPDLDefault” needs to be set to true. This setting can only be configured in /etc/vmware/settings unfortunately. So how do you automate this?
Andreas Peetz from V-Front.de came up with an awesome solution. He created a plugin to esxcli allowing you to run commands on an ESXi host. So in other words, when you install his plugin (it is a vib) you can remotely fire off a command on an ESXi host as if you are sitting behind that host.
How does that work? Well first of all you install the vib Andreas created. (Or include it in your image.) When it is installed you can simply run the following on any machine that has the vSphere CLI installed:
esxcli -s hostname -u username -p password shell cmd -c "command"
Awesome right?! I think so, this is probably one of the coolest things I have seen in a while. Very clever solution, once again… awesome work Andreas and head over to V-Front.de to get more details and the actually download of this plugin!
** Disclaimer: implementing this solution could result in an unsupported configuration. This article was published to demonstrate the capabilities of esxcli and for educational purposes **
vCloud Suite 5.1 available
No I didn’t set my alarm clock like Eric Sloof, just to be one of the first to post it… hence the reason this is “late”. But I got some more lined up for you though in the upcoming days. Now that the vCloud Suite 5.1 is available. Make sure to start your download engines and prep to upgrade. Before you start downloading, make sure to hit the launch page. I created a nice short URL for it
VMware NOW – Get the Latest Info on VMware Product Launches:
http://vmwa.re/vcloudnow
Download links:
- ESXi 5.1.0 Installable
- vCenter Server 5.1.0 and modules
- VMware vCloud Director 5.1.0
- VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1.0
- VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 1.2.0
- VMware vCenter Operations Management 5.0.3
- VMware vCenter Configuration Manager 5.5.1
- vSphere Data Protection 5.1.0
- vSphere Replication 5.1.0
- vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.0
- vCloud Networking and Security 5.1.0
- vSphere PowerCLI 5.1
- vSphere CLI 5.1
- vCenter Orchestrator Appliance 5.1.0
- vSphere Management Assistant 5.1
What’s new docs:
- What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1
- What’s new in VMware vCenter 5.1
- What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Networking
- What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform
- What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Storage
- What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Performance
- Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication
- Introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection
- What’s new in VMware vSphere Storage Appliance
- What’s new in vCloud Director 5.1