I still talk to people who are reluctant to jump in and learn some basic scripting techniques. Usually their response is that it’s easy in the gui or “scripting is hard” or the “I’m not a developer so why bother ?”. Meh, make it happen. The facts is, learning some basic Continue Reading
PowerShell
ESXi – An oldie but a goodie – CDP info via PowerCLI and Host CLI
When you don’t use something for a while, you tend to forget how valuable it can be. Even from its very early iterations, ESXi has been able to display CDP information so you can quickly establish “what’s patched where “. Easy to get from the gui, but far more useful Continue Reading
Windows Server 2012 R2- Quick tip: Disable Server Manager Loading on Startup
I try to avoid logging onto server consoles these days, preferring to do things remotely, via cli, ssh remote PowerShell etc. Somethimes though, you just have to. When I do , I really don’t like waiting for the Server Manager app to load. Rather than wait and close it off each Continue Reading
Quick Tip: Powershell snippet to alert on filesize growth
I had a request from a colleague today whether we could monitor a file and alert him if it grows above a certain size. The context around this request involves an old, legacy process that calls an Access db file and automatically runs some statistics scripts which are then fed Continue Reading
Exchange 2013 Message Tracking – The easy way, with a PowerShell Form
Message Tracking in Exchange 2013 changed significantly. In previous versions there was a simple gui driven process to do quick, basic “track & trace” message reporting. In Exchange 2013, there’s multiple ways to do this common task. Firstly using the Get-MessageTracking PowerShell commandlet, and also by using the Delivery Reports Continue Reading
vSphere/ESXi: When good tasks go bad – Fix with ESXCLI via PowerCLI
Most of the time, tasks we start in vSphere just work. That’s why we love it. Queue ’em up, and move onto something else. Sometimes though, they go bad. They freeze, stick, die or just plain error out. This happened to me last week. After changing the scratch location for Continue Reading
Commvault Simpana – Automating DBMaintenance utility execution with qlogin and Powershell
Running the dbmaintenance utility regularly is a great way to get the Commcell database in ‘primo shape. Over time, data is aged, clients are reconfigured/deleted and this can all add up to indexes getting out of date, oversized tables etc. It’s recommended to do a Full DBMAINTENANCE operation every 6 Continue Reading
ESXi/vSphere 5.5 U2: old NFS/vMotion issue reincarnated “remote host IP_Address failed with status Busy”
Uh oh, an old issue seems to have been reincarnated in vSphere 5.5 U2 which may cause vMotions of guests on NFS storage to fail with the error: remote host IP_Address failed with status Busy This issue was first evident some time ago where it affected V4.1 and was subsequently fixed Continue Reading
EMC VNX/VNX2 – Naviseccli & Powershell – Bulk config changes with ease
GUI’s are generally cool, but when you need to get many of the same/similar tasks done, you can’t beat the speed and ease of using scripts and CLI based tools. I recently had a situation with a EMC VNX2 array where someone (or something) had caused all the LUNs in Continue Reading
PowerCLI – What went where ?
I had a nice little episode with a set of PSOD looping hosts in December which resulted in a lot of guests getting moved around automatically during attempted HA recoveries. This got me thinking about all the automation that goes on ‘behind the scenes’ as a result of DRS and HA. Continue Reading