Delete Your Old VMware Snapshots

For the love of Pete, please delete your old snapshots regularly! Old snapshots have caused incidents and even outages more than once in my career and it is really easy to preemptively look for them and get them removed before anything happens. Why To put it plainly, they can cause issues - like 03:00 in the morning pager alert issues and additionally eat up storage space like crazy. Degraded performance of the VM having the snapshot Degraded performance to full outages for other VMs on the same data store due to rapidly increasing snapshot sizes VMware recommends a series of steps to reduce risk when using snapshots: [Read More]

Super-Charged Cmdlet Aliases

It works like magic, but it works - Bring your aliasing to a whole other level!

Backstory I recently wrote a post about PowerShell Aliasing for the folks over at ScriptRunner. The one issue I had while researching for this post was this: You can not create a alias for a function and overwrite one of it’s parameters at the same time while keeping nice features like tab-complete. For a concrete example of this visit please look at the original post. At the end of the post I asked if anyone had a solution to this problem - and the internet delivered! [Read More]

Bash Utilities In Powershell

Replacing common bash utilities in PowerShell

Whats the first thing coming to mind when seeing a command line? For most people it is Linux, be it Ubuntu, Debian or RedHat. And it is completely understandable. A big part of our industry has a background in Linux and sees it as the superior system for quick scripts and the like. In this series I want to challenge this notion. PowerShell can compete with, an in some cases outperform, the quick scripts and common daily tasks done in Linux shells. [Read More]

Vmware Tools Copy Files

Docs

Copy To Guest

$vm = Get-VM -Name TEST
Get-Item "X:\yourfile.txt" | Copy-VMGuestFile -Destination "c:\temp" -VM $vm -LocalToGuest -GuestUser "Administrator" -GuestPassword "Pa$$w0rd"

Copy From Guest

$vm = Get-VM -Name TEST
Copy-VMGuestFile -Source c:\yourfile.txt -Destination c:\temp\ -VM $vm -GuestToLocal -GuestUser "Administrator" -GuestPassword "Pa$$w0rd"

vCenter Cert Bundle

Errors connecting to vCenter or any ESXi server in the cluster without certificate errors?

  • Get CA cert from the vCenter: wget https://{{ YOUR VCENTER }}/certs/download.zip --no-check-certificate
  • Install where required

VMware KB