For all those not using the VirtualCenter Update Manager, Dominic uploaded an update on his esx-autopatch.pl script. You can now also patch 3.5 hosts with this script, which can come in handy for scripted installs!
Scripting
Selective VCB fullvm images
During the VMware course DSA I discovered that it is in fact possible to dump specific vmdk’s with the use of the default VCB tools. While I was finding out a way to script this I was notified in one of my blogs by JTurver(Justin Turver) that he already wrote a script that could do what I was looking for. It’s a great script for dumping all system disks and leaving the disk that are filled with data alone. You can use a text file as input for the vbs script. Check out his blog on the VMware website! Great work and thanks for pointing me out!
Checking for snapshots, html email report!
When reading the VMTN forum I stumbled upon a topic about checking the VMFS for snapshots. Besides snaphunter by Xtravirt, which is an excellent script, there isn’t much out there. You can check the VirtualCenter database for snapshots but this way you would not notice the orphaned snapshots. (Orphaned snapshot occur when the vmsd file gets corrupted.) A couple of months before Xtravirt posted their script I wrote my own snapshot checking script named snapcheck.sh. [Read more…] about Checking for snapshots, html email report!
VCB – Backup all running VMs
Today I was busy trying to find out a way to schedule VCB backups with Commvault with just 1 schedule without having to rewrite your script every time someone creates a VM. The standard procedure is to create a subclient for every VM which is very human error prone. I stumbled upon a blog on RTFM about backing up all running VM’s, the actual script was done by Andrew Neilson, thanks! [Read more…] about VCB – Backup all running VMs
VMware ESX healthcheck
One of the most useful scripts for ESX in my opinion is health_check.sh. This scripts generates an html file which contains a enormous amount of useful info on how the ESX host was installed. Besides that it contains 30 lines of the most important log files and for instance if there are snapshots and much much more. I just tested the script on ESX 3.5 and it still works great. The script is created by two guys of the Danish VMUG one of them is A. Mikkelsen, check his blog for more scripts! Be sure to check out this script, it’s worth it! By the way, you can schedule it and have the html emailed to you via the use of smtp_send.pl.