WilliamLam.com

Quick Tip - vCenter Server Advanced Settings Reference

by // 1 Comment

Simliar to my ESXi Advanced and Kernel Settings reference, I was recently asked about creating one for vCenter Server to capture all the default out of the box advanced settings.

With some automation in place, I deployed all major releases of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) from 6.7 to 8.0 which is available in this repo: https://github.com/lamw/vc-advanced-settings


For those interested, here is the one-liner PowerCLI code to retrieve all vCenter Server advanced settings:

Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity ($global:DefaultVIServer)

Useful vSphere Automation techniques for assisting with CrowdStrike remediation

by // 9 Comments

By now, you have probably heard about or have directly been impacted by the recent CrowdStrike software update to Microsoft Windows system causing an unprecedented global outage. I know IT administrators are working around the clock to remediate thousands if not tens of thousands of Windows systems, the current recommended remediation process from CrowdStrike is definitely painful since it requires users to go into Windows safe mode to remove the offending file. To further complex things, most organizations enable Microsoft Bitlocker, which adds additional step to the already painful manual remediation process as you now have to locate your recovery keys before you login to apply the fix.

Within hours of the CrowdStrike news, I already saw a number of inquiries from our customers and field asking if there were any automated solutions or scripts that could aide in their remediation as asking any organization to manually remediate is a non-starter with the scale of deployments for most Enterprises. While getting up to speed on the remediation steps and thinking about how our vSphere platform can help users automate, what is typically a manual task, I had a few ideas that folks might find useful.

Disclaimer: The scripts provided in this article are meant as examples, please test and adapt them based on your own environment as these have not been tested in any official capacity and the behaviors may vary from environment to environment. Please use at your own risk.

[Read more...]

Automating the retrieval & reclamation of VM MAC address blocklist for vCenter Server using the vSphere MOB

by // Leave a Comment

As shared in this blog post HERE and HERE, vCenter Server has a built-in mechanism for managing VM MAC addresses where the original VM has been migrated to a different vCenter Server (regardless of the vCenter SSO Domain) using a VM MAC Address blocklist.

The VM MAC address blocklist functionality is still only available using a private API and the only way to find out what VM MAC addresses are currently in the list is by interactively using the vSphere MOB and the fetchRelocatedMACAddress API.

Recently, I had a question from a customer who was looking to clear the VM MAC address blocklist and was wondering if that was possible and whether there was an API to perform this operation?

[Read more...]