I was recently in a situation where a number of customer VM suddenly became unusable. When investigating the VMs in vCenter we could see that the disk latency was in the seconds. The back end storage was a NetApp AFF connected to the hosts using Fiber Channel. So looking at the AFF event logs I…
Tag: Powershell
Using SSHShellStream
One of my pet projects I am working on is a fully auto VCSA certificate checking script. I want to check the machine, root and STS certificates. I still have some problems to over come but I think I have solved my most pressing problem. That problem was how do I SSH to the VCSA…
Write to debug/log file function
Here is a function to save time when writing logging or debugging information in scripts. It has grown from a simple “dump stuff to a file” to a handy “Swiss army knife” of logging. The function is not perfect and will no doubt keep growing. A quick thing to mention is that if the file…
VCSA Cert checking script
Over the past year I have seen quite a few STS certs expire in production environments. I have been meaning to write something to scan a VCSA and report back the expiry dates of all the certs. This has posed a problem because I have to use SSH and one command needs to follow another….
VMWare tasks
Some thing I always send a lot of time doing is looking for old tasks in vCenter. When using the web client or even Powershell you get a list of active tasks and some old ones before they disappear. You can go back through the Event list but sometimes you need to see the tasks….
VM clone script
This is a VM clone/”backup” script that I use in my home lab. I schedule this script to make a clone of important VMs (works with vCenter) and clones them to another datastore. Obveusly this is not a proper backup but if I make a config change or lose a datastore then this will (and…
File deletion scripts
I get asked quite alot at work to monitor folders and delete files older then x days or stop them growing out of control. These folders are normaly FTP backups of things that do not age out. Like config backups (NSX im looking at you). There are a couple of ways to do this. The…
NetApp performance monitoring using Powershell
I recently had to run some monitoring commands to gather information while a backup was running. So I used Powershell. I needed to SSH on to the FAS and run the following: So why should I do that when I can get Powershell to do it. Here is a quick bit of Powershell to SSH…
Tutorial, Using Credentials
A common problem I have is that the account that runs a powershell script does not have the required rights on a remote computer to do its job. It could be because the remote “thing” only has local accounts or is a windows computer on a different domain. The old way of getting round this…
Report VM reconfigurations
One this that has always bugged me with vCenter UIs is seeing a reconfigure VM task but not being able to tell what was changed. Some times in an investigation this can be very important. While looking at Event objects one day I discovered an attribute called configchanges on a reconfigured event object. In there…