Luke

NetApp SnapMirror & RDMs – Automated failover

A few months ago, a reader by the name of Tolga ŞENTEKİN came across This Post looking for something to do a little more. Tolga was looking to script out DR for some VMs he has that use NetApp with & without RDMs. He & I spent about three weeks putting a script together to do the following:

Breaks snapmirror replication
Creates flexclones of the replicated volumes (given you’re licensed for it)
Map them to the esx hosts on the disaster recovery site
Adds and resignatures the LUNs and adds the VMs inside them to the inventory
After that, if you have RDM LUNs attached to the VMs, you first remove the old RDM Mappings from the VM and add the actual LUNs in the disaster site with the same LunID’s
If it’s all done you can start the Vm’s in the disaster site.

Tolga wrote the vast majority of the script, with me only contributing some of the datastore, LUN, & iSCSI stuff.

I uploaded it and have provided a link, since I didn’t want it to get sauteed up from a C&P.

Click HERE to download a copy of the script (right-click, save-as). Obviously, you will need to edit & fine tune for your environment, but he & I wanted to share with the community.

Error 25085 – Setup failed to register VMware Update Manager extension to VMware vCenter Server

I upgraded my vCenter to 4.1u1 while my VUM was still 4.0 (u2 iirc). I decided to upgrade my VUM to match, and all was going well until I got this message:

Error 25085 – Setup failed to register VMware Update Manager extension to VMware vCenter Server

Script to export VMs with thin provisioned disks to CSV file

I wanted to know how many disks in our environment are thin provisioned, so I wrote a quick function to export that list to a CSV file.

I have it pull the VM name, vmdk path & name, Size in GB, and if it’s Thin Provisioned (Boolean, which should always be true).

Function to list all VMs with Snapshots

Using the PowerGUI, you can list all snapshots, but unfortunately, it doesn’t list the parent VM.

I wrote a quick little function to search all VMs that have snapshots and list them.

Add domain group to local administrator group in Windows using PowerShell

I built 38 new servers and needed to add a domain group to the local administrator group of all of them. Instead of using computer management (compmgmt.msc) to connect to each one, or a GPO, I decided to use PowerShell, and found it’s actually pretty simple to do.

Cisco Nexus 1000v

I loath the Nexus 1000v. That is all…

Create new role & user on ESXi host via PowerCLI & PowerShell

In this post I talked about automated deployment that launches the remote console for me. Since I had 24 hosts that need the user & role, I created a script that does it for me. Nothing special, just something quick that works…

Automated deployment script builds VM, registers in SCCM

This is a follow-up to my last post about fully automated deployment

Below is the script. After it pulls the information from you, it creates the VM, adds the second disk, sleeps for 15 seconds, pulls the MAC from the new VM, creates the computer object in SCCM, adds it to the collection, sleeps for 15 seconds, refreshes the collection, sleeps for 15 seconds, then powers on the VM. If you’ve got a mandatory OSD advertised to the collection specified, and the OSD is fully automated, it will lay down the OS and the computername will be the name you provided to the script.

PowerCLI + VMware + SCCM = sweetness, aka automated deployment

So I’m creating a script that builds a VM for you, imports the NetBIOS name & MAC address into SCCM, adds it to a specific collection, and then powers on the VM. If you have a mandatory OS Deployment for that collection, you don’t have to do anything but sit back and watch (given your Task Sequence is fully automated).

It prompts you for vCenter name, VM name, cpu, ram, description, disk size, queries vcenter for clusters, networks, datastores (sorted by free space), and verifies with you before building…

I’m excited & pleased that it’s actually working. It’s currently proprietary to my work environment, but I will try to strip all that out and let you change what needs to be changed to use it where you like.

Happy Scripting!!!