vCenter 6.5 hybrid certificates with Microsoft Standalone CA

Posted on March 12, 2018

The hybrid mode is currently VMware’s recommended deployment model for certificates as it procures a good level of security while not being too cumbersome to implement. In this model only the Machine SSL certificate is signed by the CA and replaced on the vCenter server. The solution user and ESXi... [Read More]

Install the latest PowerCLI on offline systems

Posted on March 3, 2018

If you keep your PowerCLI up to date you may have noticed that since version 6.5.1 you can’t download the installer on the VMware website anymore. This being because VMware moved the distribution of PowerCLI to Powershell Gallery using the cmdlets Install-Module, <code class="language-plaintext... [Read More]

All your VMs in RDCManager in 20 seconds

Posted on February 18, 2018

[ EDIT 2021/08/18 ] RDCMan suffered security flaws up until version 2.7 and Microsoft recommended against using it. RDC Manager 2.8 has been released in July 2021 and is now safe to use. Note that it is now part of the Sysinternals suite. Do not use... [Read More]

Meltdown & Spectre - Check if your ESXi servers are patched

Posted on January 6, 2018

[Update 20/03/2018] VMware now recommends to apply the patch for Hypervisor-Assisted Guest Mitigation. According to them the performance impact is less than 2%. I haven’t patched yet and I will wait for the feedback of early adopters. The start of the year has been so ridiculous with patches... [Read More]

Metro cluster partial DCI failure

Posted on December 8, 2017

In this article I would like to cover a failure scenario that I recently dealt with and that I suspect is maybe not that common for several reasons. The environment is made of 2 sites in a metro cluster sharing a virtualised storage over a multiplexed fiber. Half of the... [Read More]

Easily run PowerCLI commands as jobs

Posted on August 8, 2017

Overview Start-PowerCLIJobs.ps1 Running commands as jobs is pretty mainstream in Powershell. A simple “Start-Job” or “Invoke-Command -AsJob” will do the trick. However, when PowerCLI is involved it is not as straightforward. If you try to run a command that requires to be connected to a vCenter you will... [Read More]

NSX DFW rule - lost access to vCenter

Posted on July 23, 2017

I was playing with NSX recently and testing the distributed firewall (DFW) that allows for east-west firewalling, aka micro-segmentation. All was going well when I disconnected my brain for a second and added a rule “deny all all” (Yes I know…). Following that moment facepalm I obviously lost access to... [Read More]

Docker in vSphere Part 1 - Introduction

Posted on June 19, 2017

Docker in vSphere : Part 2 - Install and configure vDVS (to come) Overview I am starting a series of articles about running containers on PhotonOS in a vSphere environment with VMware’s implementation of the docker storage driver called “vSphere Docker... [Read More]

Generate a random password in Powershell

Posted on June 7, 2017

I recently needed to generate random password for an PowerCLI automation project. However, although there is a Get-Random cmdlet, it is limited to generate random numbers. Not good enough for a password, so I decided to write my own. This function allows you to choose what types of characters to... [Read More]