On October 1st 2015 VMware published Security Advisory VMSA-2015-0007. In that advisory you will find three vulnerabilities: CVE-2015-5177, CVE-2015-2342 and CVE-2015-1047.
To anticipate the questions you will surely get from your local Security Officer, I created a function to report which vSphere Servers in your environment are impacted, and which action to take.
Update October 5th 2015:
Another one from the PowerCLI Community. User internetrush1 wanted to know how he could rename an ESXi server through PowerCLI.
In fact I was amazed there obviously is no cmdlet nor scripts available to perform this rather basic task. Luckily I had some code snippets laying around that did the job. Basically, I followed KB1010821 to do the ESXi 5.x host rename. But I decided it would be better to provide a real function to do the job.
During last year’s VMworld #NotSupported sessions one of the hot topics was William Lam‘s vInception talk. “Nested ESXi” has since then become indispensable in the homelab of everyone tinkering with virtualisation !
As a follow-up to that session, William posted several blog posts on the subject. You can find them all in a handy overview.
But as much as I like his clear instructions on how to set up nested ESXi, I wanted to automate the process 🙂 In my homelab I create, and remove, ESXi VMs on a regular basis. So with the “If you do it more than once, automate it” in mind, I decided to create a function for the process.
Continue reading HL Tools – Part 2 – Create a Nested Hypervisor
In my homelab I try to automate as much as possible. I have a number of scripts and functions that help me setting up test environments in my homelab. Since I got quite a number of requests on this, I decided to start a series on my homelab tools.
One of the tasks I automated is the provisioning of VMs. Quite easy when you have a vCenter that manages the cloning process. But in layer 1 of my homelab I’m running ESXi standalone on a PaaS provided server, so no vCenter.
With the Copy-DatastoreItem cmdlet it is easy to clone the files of a VM, but this kind of copy doesn’t know about the different types of VirtualDisk you can have in a VM. As a result, your Thin vdisks become Thick vDisks in the clone. The function in this post avoids that problem by using the VirtualDiskManager for copying the VMDK.
Note that there are a couple of prerequisites: the master VM needs to be powered off and have no snapshots. And till now I only tested this with VMs that run a Windows guest OS.
Continue reading HL Tools – Part 1 – Clone a VM without vCenter
With my new HaaS based home lab, I experience some limitations I need to live with. There is for example no way to insert a CD or DVD, nor can I use any USB key or a network boot.
That means that some of the procedures I have been using since long, need to be reviewed and updated. The next post describes one of the practical problems I encountered.
How do you remotely upgrade an ESXi server to version 5.1 ?
But as you can imagine, everything is “posh“-able. I was able to automate a manual procedure, and more important, I was able to upgrade my ESXi server to 5.1.
As most of you should know VMware is organising a scripting contest, called Script-O-Mania. For those of you that haven’t submitted anything yet, hurry up. The closing date is tomorrow (March 15th 2010).
After some reflection I decided to go for a performance monitoring script. I wanted to have the vCenter client performance tab, without having to pay for the vCenter Agent license. And I wanted to offer some of the functionality that esxtop provided on the classic ESX systems.
That’s where my PSTop v1 script came to be.
