Planet vSphere-land

VMware Labs just released a really cool new Fling called VIB Author which is a tool that allows you to easily create custom VIBs for your ESXi 5.x hosts. If you have tried to create custom ESXi firewall rules or add custom scripts to your ESXi host, you may have noticed they are not persisted after a system reboot and you had to play all sorts of games to get the files to persist. The VIB Author...

I needed to provide some examples of PowerShell code recently for a quick reference poster and thought this might be useful for others looking for quick code examples. All the examples you need can be found by using Get-Help with the –Examples parameter.  Did you know that as with everything else in PowerShell these items are returned as nice objects, we can easily pick the items we need to c...

If you have been using the image builder and auto deploy cmdlets which came with vSphere 5.0 then you will already know how easy it is to completely rebuild all hosts just by replacing a simple auto deploy rule with your new image profile and then rebooting your hosts. But how do you create your new image profile ? An Image profile normally consists of a base ESXi image downloaded from VMware an...

One of the best and one of my favorite ideas from the PowerCLI team (there are so many to choose from) was to include an initialization script when you launch PowerCLI, this gives us the nice black background, custom prompt and also other things like the Get-VICommand function. Get-VICommand lists all the VMware related cmdlets added to your session, this is useful for quickly listing the VMware...

In this video we’re going to cover the installation, configuration and usage of the VMware vCenter 5.0 Server Appliance (vCSA). The vCSA is a brand new production ready Virtual Appliance that allows you to stand up vCenter Server in literally a few minutes. Once you watch the video you’re going to be like, “Hey Rick, that was more than 5 minutes!”.  For that I do apolog...