Category: PowerCLI

Automating the creation of virtual machine hard disks and NTFS mounted volumes for a virtual machine.

December 14, 2014

As part of an automated delivery of a virtual machine running Microsoft SQL Server I had a requirement to create a number of virtual machine hard disks  and for each disk create a NTFS mounted folder. In order to achieve this I was required to create two functions one to create the virtual machine hard … More Automating the creation of virtual machine hard disks and NTFS mounted volumes for a virtual machine.

Waiting on virtual machine Guest OS customization to complete

December 3, 2014

I recently discovered a blog article from Vitali Baruh on the PowerCLI QE team in regards to waiting for the guest OS customization to complete following a deployment of a virtual machine from a template. http://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/2012/08/waiting-for-os-customization-to-complete.html As Vitali discusses this process can be difficult to determine if this has completed in the guest operating system and if the … More Waiting on virtual machine Guest OS customization to complete

Modifying guest network interface with the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet

November 28, 2014

With the news that the ‘Set-VMGuestNetworkInterface’ cmdlet is to be deprecated in the next release of PowerCLI (http://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/2014/11/announcement-future-cmdlet-deprecation.html), the question is how do I now modify the guest network interface? The ability to perform this action can now be moved to the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet, which is a pretty cool way to invoke a script in … More Modifying guest network interface with the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet

Update: Patch Management for Guest VMS with Windows Update Server and WUInstall on vSphere

November 24, 2014

I previously described steps to automate approved updates from a WSUS server with WUInstall for virtual machines managed by VMware vCenter Server (https://deangrant.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/patch-management-for-guest-vms-with-windows-update-server-and-wuinstall-on-vsphere/). I have recently updated this process to filter virtual machines objects by tagging objects in the new functionality in the vSphere Web Client. Also, the previous process had no concept of  task parallelism, which has now … More Update: Patch Management for Guest VMS with Windows Update Server and WUInstall on vSphere

Adding NFS storage using the command line interface (CLI) with esxcfg and PowerCLI

November 18, 2014

In this example I will look at creating an NFS datastore using both esxcfg command line interface and PowerCLI to which I will use the following parameters. Datastore Name: openfiler-nfs2 NFS Host: 10.0.0.6 NFS mount point: /mnt/nfs/nfs2/vmfs/ By connecting to an ESXi hosts console session we can invoke the esxcfg command line interface to create … More Adding NFS storage using the command line interface (CLI) with esxcfg and PowerCLI