Check ESXi installation date using Powershell

Have you ever found yourself wondering when a certain ESXi server was installed? In this case VMware GSS has your back. Check out KB 2144905 to find a simple esxcli command that dissects the hosts UUID to give you the installation date of that specific host. But what if you want to audit an entire cluster? This is where Powershell can help you out.

Virtual Machine BootTime property is not being populated

Ever so often you come around something that you haven’t seen before. Well this issue is one of those things. In our environments we use loads of metrics and properties that we gather from the vCenter Server and expose them to the customer in our own custom front-end portal. One …

Resolving the mysterious and unknown issues with the PowerCLI Tag cmdlets!

Introduction to vSphere Tags VMware vSphere Tags is a way to attach metadata to VMware vCenter inventory objects to make it easier to find and recognize these objects. If you, like me, know about this functionality within vSphere, you know how useful this can be. In previous versions of vSphere, …

Ancient VMware View Scripted Reporting

A while ago I was working on a very very old VMware View environment. Yes, you’ve read this correctly, a VMware View environment. This is even from before the product was officially called “VMware Horizon View” back in 2015. So, the subject I was working on for the customer, but …

Round up virtual hard disk size

Quick post of something I ran into this week. When creating new VMs it makes sense to create disks that have a certain size in GB. But sometimes when migrating workload from one platform to another you might see some funky hard disk sizes like this.

Fixing this for …

Clearing ESXi System Event Log (SEL) via PowerCLI

We recently noticed some hosts in our environment that show an alert triggered by ‘Status of other host hardware objects’. Upon further investigation it turned out that this was caused by the system event log (SEL) that is about to run out of space. Now if you don’t mind not …

Slow boot times ESXi with (p/v)RDM’s easy fix

Recently we have been having (extremely) slow boot times for a couple of hosts that we’ve been using for a new customer. We actually didn’t really notice this in the beginning, until we added hosts to the existing cluster and the reboot for that host took over 3 hours! The …

NLVMUG UserCon 2019 recordings available on YouTube

On March 21 Bryan and myself attended the Dutch VMUG UserCon 2019. It was a very busy day filled with a lot of interesting content. If you were unable to attend or missed a session because of scheduling conflicts you can now view them on YouTube! Check out the following …

PowerCLI: Function to import VMX files from a datastore

Recently we’ve had to revert to migrating a customer through cloning virtual machines to a lun on a ‘migration storage box’ after which we had to do an import in our vCenter environment. Normally I just Veeam for ease in the whole migration process but this time there were circumstances …