PowerCLI

PowerShell for PhotonOS on Raspberry Pi 3

01/25/2019 by William Lam 4 Comments

Did you know VMware PhotonOS can also run on a Raspberry Pi (rPI) 3? I definitely did not until recently when I found out the latest 3.0 version also had an image for the rPI. This is great for anyone who is already familiar with PhotonOS and wish to run it in an even smaller form factor such as an rPI. There are definitely some interesting use cases for an rPI such as a tiny management host, troubleshooting tool for consultants or even a quick PowerShell/PowerCLI host that contains some basic tools and scripts which you can quickly access.

I was definitely interested in getting PowerShell and PowerCLI running on top PhotonOS on the rPI. Although you can already run PowerShell on an rPI using the Raspbian OS, the current distribution from Microsoft is actually only 32-Bit, which is a problem for PhotonOS as it is a 64-Bit OS. I was about to give up but while browsing the Microsoft PowerShell repo, I came across their upcoming PowerShell 6.2.0 (Preview) release which now looks to include a 64-Bit ARM build, which is exactly what I needed. For PowerCLI, although I was able to get the modules loaded, I was not able to connect to a vCenter Server or ESXi endpoint, you can find more details at the bottom of this post.

Below are the instructions for installing PhotonOS on the rPI and getting PowerShell setup:

Step 1 - Download and install the Etcher tool which will be used to flash our rPI

Step 2 - Download and install PhotonOS 3.0 RC rPI image using Etcher

Once PhotonOS has been installed, you can login (default credentials are root/changeme) and we now have PhotonOS running on our rPI!

Next we will install PowerShell as well as the latest PowerCLI modules.
[Read more...] about PowerShell for PhotonOS on Raspberry Pi 3

Automating Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) configuration using vSphere API and PowerCLI

01/24/2019 by William Lam 2 Comments

After publishing my recent article on the new the vSphere Health capability which takes advantage of VMware's Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), I had a couple of folks reach out asking how their customers could check whether CEIP is enabled for a given vCenter Server and if not, how to enable it using Automation. For one of these customers, they had over 25+ vCenter Server, so they were not interested in doing this by hand and nor should they.

For those interested in the vSphere UI, the CEIP settings is configured in the Administration menu under the Deployment section as shown in the screenshot below.

We can also manage the CEIP settings programmatically using vSphere API and this is controlled by an Advanced vCenter Server setting called VirtualCenter.DataCollector.ConsentData. The value of this property is actually a JSON payload as you can see in the screenshot below and when updating this property, we need to update both the change version as well as whether we want CEIP enabled or disabled for a given vCenter Server.

Instant Clone Microsoft Windows & VM Keystroke VMworld demo and code posted

01/08/2019 by William Lam 2 Comments

Apologies for the delay in getting my VMworld 2018 demo and code posted online, I know a number of you have been asking about the Windows Instant Clone samples to get an idea on how to create your own customization scripts for managing more "recent" Microsoft Windows releases 😉 and perhaps you might even consider submitting a pull request to share with the community. I have posted both the videos and code samples below. Enjoy and happy Automating!

Instant Clone Microsoft Windows

To demonstrate the power of the newly re-architected Instant Clone feature in vSphere 6.7 and to help make the point clear that the Instant Clone feature is really Guest Operating System agnostic, meaning you can Instant Clone any to Virtual Machine that can run VMware Tools, I thought it would be fun to see how old of a Microsoft OS that I could Instant Clone. After a bit of trial/error, that turned out to be Windows 98 and Windows 2000 🙂

Windows 98 Demo

Windows 2000 Demo

Managing Distributed Firewall Rules in VMC using PowerShell & NSX-T Policy API

01/04/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Back in November 2018, VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) SDDC 1.5 Patch 1 was released and it was one of the most highly anticipated release by our customers. Although this was a "patch" release, it included a ton of new features and also brought the full power of the NSX-T platform to VMC as a generally available feature!

With NSX-T, customers also now have access to the highly requested Distributed Firewall (DFW) capability which enables granular control over East-West traffic between application workloads. In addition to enabling micro-segmentation in VMC, customers can now easily manage DFW rules using a number of grouping constructs (Tags, Virtual Machines & Conditional Statements) to create dynamic policies which follow their workloads.

Customers can configure DFW (as well as Edge Firewall) rules using the VMC Console UI but many of you have been asking for an automated method, especially if you need to create a large number of policies for more than a couple of workloads. After returning from the holiday, I spent the last couple of days updating my NSX-T Policy PowerShell Module which now includes basic support for managing DFW. For those of you who are new to using the NSX-T Policy API and PowerCLI, be sure to give these two articles a read here and here before proceeding further.

Automating Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) Manager initial configuration for VMC

10/29/2018 by William Lam 2 Comments

Following up from my previous Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) Automation article which looked at deploying the HCX Manager OVA, this article will now focus on automating the initial configuration of HCX Manager including the registration to HCX Cloud which will enable the on-prem HCX Manager to be used with VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC). Once HCX Manager is up and running, customers can configure the system using the HCX VAMI interface which is available on port 9443 via the UI or in our case with the HCX VAMI APIs.

I have updated my HCX PowerShell Module to include 8 additional functions that can be used for initial configuration of HCX Manager:

Set-HcxVCConfig
Set-HcxLicense
Get-HcxNSXConfig
Set-HcxNSXConfig
Get-HcxLocation
Set-HcxLocation
Get-HcxRoleMapping
Set-HcxRoleMapping
Get-HcxProxy
Set-HcxProxy
Remove-HcxProxy