WilliamLam.com

Quick Tip - Using PowerCLI to query VMware Tools Configuration at scale 

by // Leave a Comment

One of the most powerful and versatile VM management capability in vSphere is the Guest Operations API, providing a rich set of operations from transferring files to/from the guest to running commands directly on the guest as if you were logged in!

An easy way to consume the Guest Operations API is via PowerCLI and using the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet, which I have extensively written about, showcasing all the creative ways this can be used to solve various automation challenges.

I recently came across a Reddit thread where the OP wanted to check to query for a specific VMware Tools configuration as part of the vSphere Security Configuration Guide and was looking for some help as logging into each and every system did not seem like a good idea, which it is NOT! 🙂

Any time you have a use case where you need to scale a specific operation (reading or writing) a change, you should consider Guest Operations API, you can easily use a single API to perform this operation at scale!

[Read more...]

Updated Dashboard for VMware Community Homelabs using Dashimo

by // 1 Comment

While working on some data analysis for an internal project, I was looking for a better way to summarize and provide some visualizations of the raw data for better consumption.

I also wanted to automate this process, so that I could easily build reports or dashboards regardless of the frequency of requests and/or dataset size. After a bit of searching, I came across a very awesome PowerShell Module called Dashimo, which builds on top of another PowerShell Module called PSWriteHTML, which provides a framework for creating HTML reports.

After playing around with Dashimo over the weekend and successfully using it for my internal project, I thought I would update the dashboard I provide today for the VMware Community Homelabs Project, where users from our community can submit their VMware Homelab BOM (Build of Materials) that can benefit the broader community.

I really like the simplicity and ease of use that Dashimo provides and the dashboards that you can build are all interactive, so it is not just a static image. For those interested in seeing Dashimo in action or if you want to check out the new dashboard for the VMware Community Homelabs, you can access it at: https://lamw.github.io/homelab/

Useful NVMe Tiering reporting using vSphere 8.0 Update 3 APIs

by // 2 Comments

After successfully enabling the NVMe Tiering feature, which was introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 3, you can find some useful details about your NVMe Tiering configuration by navigating to a specific ESXi host and under Configure->Hardware and under the Memory section as shown in the screenshot below.


There is quite a bit of information that we can see, so lets break down the individual items that are useful from an NVMe Tiering point of view and the specific vSphere APIs that can be used to retrieve this information.

[Read more...]