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Showing posts from December, 2015

Custom PowerShell Profile to Connect to One of Many vCenter Servers

One of my customers has many physical datacenters, each with its own vCenter server.  The servers are all connected via Linked Mode, which works fine in the GUI, but at the CLI I don't usually want to connect to every one of them.  Fortunately, connect-viserver doesn't do so unless you use the -AllLinked switch, so that's fine.  Unfortunately, I'm left in a position where I need to connect my PowerCLI session to any one of many vCenter servers, and I don't necessarily like typing that much or remembering that many server names. Fortunately, I can address both of those points in one fell swoop, through PowerShell Profiles .  When you launch PowerShell, it simply applies the appropriate PowerShell Profile (aka. a script that you can use to customize your work environment) to that session and you're good to go.  So, I put together a customized PowerShell Profile for myself that presents me with a "Connect to vCenter" option and a little text driven men

Renaming ESXi Host Local Datastores by PowerCLI

One of my customers set up a large number of ESXi hosts, installed on local storage.  Since they're not doing anything with that storage, they never bothered renaming those datastores and so their vCenter inventory was filled with instances of "datastore1 (#)".  This is just a housekeeping thing, but that's really messy.  Generally speaking, a bit of mess isn't a big deal, but those little messes always seem to cause problems when you're troubleshooting some other major issue.  And, fortunately, this is really easy to fix.  Rather than write my own script, I did some quick googling and found that VMNICK had done all the work already, with his own " rename local host storage " script. In his post, he notes that the script might explode if you use the string "datastore1" on any other datastores in the environment.  Excepting a very particular subset of situations, I'm not a fan of explosions, and so I figured that I could probably fix t