WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: guest operations

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...]

Automating Workload Management on vSphere with Tanzu

by // 7 Comments

As promised, here is the complimentary solution to my existing Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script, which will automatically deploy and configure the required infrastructure (vCenter Server Appliance, ESXi, vSAN and HAProxy VMs) so that you can quickly jump to enabling Workload Management on your vSphere Cluster.

FYI: Ben Corrie, one of the Engineers on the vSphere with Tanzu team recently published a vSphere with Tanzu 4-Part Deep Dive video series where he walks you through in deploying everything from scratch along with the concepts that should help you better understand how vSphere with Tanzu works. He is actually doing this in his own personal homelab and thought this might be useful to share with others. Kudos Ben and highly recommend folks check out his video if you new to vSphere with Tanzu and Kubernetes.


Enabling Workload Management is a manual step after the automated deployment script and as you know, I prefer to automate as much as I can. I have updated my existing PowerCLI Workload Management Module to now also support the new vSphere with Tanzu capability using HAProxy for networking instead of NSX-T. The module can be downloaded from PowerShell Gallery by simply running

[Read more...]

PowerCLI Module for managing vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO)

by // 18 Comments

A few years back I had submitted a PowerCLI Feature Request (PCLI-44) via the public PowerCLI Ideas platform requesting for a PowerCLI module that would support vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) Administrative functionality such as managing SSO Users, Groups, Password, Lockout Policy and Identity Sources.


This was one of the most popular Idea voted by the PowerCLI community, which also stressed the need for such functionality which I came across on a regular basis on some of the Automation I was writing. In the past, I have written numerous blog articles in working around this limitation as the vCenter SSO Admin APIs were not and leveraging Guest Operations API, one could still automate various SSO operations using the various SSO CLIs that is included within the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).

Today, I received a notification from the PowerCLI Ideas platform that this feature as "Shipped" and it looks like the PowerCLI team has just released an Open Source Module called VMware.vSphere.SsoAdmin that includes the following 12 cmdlets:

  • Add-ActiveDirectoryIdentitySource
  • Add-GroupToSsoGroup
  • Add-LDAPIdentitySource
  • Add-UserToSsoGroup
  • Connect-SsoAdminServer
  • Disconnect-SsoAdminServer
  • Get-IdentitySource
  • Get-SsoAuthenticationPolicy
  • Get-SsoGroup
  • Get-SsoLockoutPolicy
  • Get-SsoPasswordPolicy
  • Get-SsoPersonUser
  • Get-SsoTokenLifetime
  • New-SsoGroup
  • New-SsoPersonUser
  • Remove-GroupFromSsoGroup
  • Remove-IdentitySource
  • Remove-SsoGroup
  • Remove-SsoPersonUser
  • Remove-UserFromSsoGroup
  • Set-LDAPIdentitySource
  • Set-SsoAuthenticationPolicy
  • Set-SsoGroup
  • Set-SsoLockoutPolicy
  • Set-SsoPasswordPolicy
  • Set-SsoPersonUser
  • Set-SsoSelfPersonUserPassword
  • Set-SsoTokenLifetime

To get started with the new PowerCLI SSO Module, take a look at the instructions below.

[Read more...]