WilliamLam.com

Easily audit ESXi boot options programmatically in vSphere 8.0 Update 3

by // Leave a Comment

ESXi (kernel) boot options can be added during ESXi boot up (by pressing SHIFT+O) or by updating the ESXi boot.cfg configuration to influence specific configurations and/or behaviors.

In the past, it was difficult to get visibility across your fleet of ESXi hosts on which hosts might be using custom boot options, especially in cases where you might not need them anymore or worse if someone has manually added a configuration that you did not intend.

In vSphere 8.0 Update 3, a new bootCommandLine property has been added to the vSphere API and can now provide full visibility into all boot options used for a given ESXi host.

PowerCLI 13.3 had also GA'ed yesterday, which supports latest APIs introduced in both vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2  and you can easily access this new property by running the following command:

(Get-VMHost).ExtensionData.Hardware.SystemInfo

Quick Tip - Disable network traffic monitoring (promiscuous) UI prompt in VMware Fusion

by // Leave a Comment

While working on some demos planned for my VMware Explore session, Tech Deep Dive: Automating VMware ESXi Installation At Scale [CODEB1574LV], I kept getting this network monitoring prompt when powering up my Nested ESXi VM running in VMware Fusion.


Since Nested ESXi requires the use of promiscuous mode (for inner-VM networking), you will be prompted to approve of the request or networking will be disabled. For demo purposes, you probably do not want this prompting and I was wondering if this could be disabled. After a quick ping in our internal VMware Hosted Google Space, I learned that we can disable the UI prompt by adding a VMX option to the VM.

[Read more...]

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...]