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]

Automatically evacuate a host without DRS

Posted on April 27, 2017

Like many other places I believe, our non-prod hosts run on vSphere Standard instead of Enterprise Plus for its lower price. The price is great, but what isn’t is that DRS isn’t available. Which means every time a host needs to be put in maintenance mode you have to do... [Read More]

VCP6-DCV certification

Posted on February 27, 2017

After months of studying (some more than others) and running labs, I finally commited to the VCP exam and passed it succesfully. This industry-recognized certification validates that you know how to administer and troubleshoot vSphere V6 infrastructures, leveraging best practices to provide a scalable and reliable virtualization platform for... [Read More]

How to reduce the cost of your VMware infrastructure

Posted on January 27, 2017

Since the start of virtualisation as we know it, two CPU sockets configurations were the obvious choice since it allowed to increase density and run more VMs on a single server, saving in the meantime money on the other components such as RAID controllers, network cads/HBAs, chassis, disks, you name... [Read More]

Don't bother with IPs, ping VMs

Posted on January 4, 2017

One thing that we all do quite regularly is pinging servers. In a medium/big environment there can be a lot of VMs and I can’t remember all the IP addresses or even the hostnames, which is annoying when I want to ping one of them. It’s still easy to find... [Read More]

How Power management impacts ESXi performance

Posted on December 21, 2016

Recently at work we’ve been noticing erratic performance on VMs eventhough the host’s CPU wasn’t running particularly hot. In order to check if there was contention I looked at the DRS chart and discovered that the CPU, not even hitting the 50% bar was not delivering half the resources. The... [Read More]

PowerCLI 6.5 broke my Powershell custom prompt!

Posted on November 22, 2016

This blog post applies only if you have a customized Powershell prompt. Function Prompt { … } in Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 EDIT 03/03/2018 The new version of PowerCLI support module auto loading so you don’t need to worry about importing the modules anymore. My Powershell profile... [Read More]

vSphere 6 host randomly disconnects from vCenter

Posted on October 17, 2016

I got a few email alerts recently from my vCenter regarding host not responding and disconnect at a random time. At first I tried to find a pattern for what could be potentially causing the issue and quickly realized that nothing funny was happening in vSphere-land. So I had a... [Read More]

Convert LUN canonical name to datastore and vice versa

Posted on October 13, 2016

Someone recently asked in a VMTN post for a way to know what datastore is associated with a LUN canonical name (naa.xxxxxx). It can actually be quite annoying to find which datastore we are talking about when all we have is a canonical name. It’s either putting on the... [Read More]

Snapshot consolidation: vsphere 5 vs vSphere 6

Posted on September 23, 2016

Prior to vSphere 6 the consolidation mecanism worked such a way that it could lead to issues where the consolidation of snapshots would fail and retry over and over again and could lead to crazy long stun times with unresponsive guest OS or a snapshot that doesn’t want to go... [Read More]