We've been working lately to use HashiCorp Packer to standardize and automate our VM template builds, and we found a need to pull in all of the contents of a specific directory on an internal web server. This would be pretty simple for Linux systems using wget -r, but we needed to find another solution for our Windows builds.
A coworker and I cobbled together a quick PowerShell solution which will download the files within a specified web URL to a designated directory (without recreating the nested folder structure):
I recently wrote about getting started with VMware's Tanzu Community Edition and deploying phpIPAM as my first real-world Kubernetes workload. Well I've spent much of my time since then working on a script which would help to populate my phpIPAM instance with a list of networks to monitor.
Planning and Exporting The first step in making this work was to figure out which networks I wanted to import. We've got hundreds of different networks in use across our production vSphere environments.
I recently needed to export a list of all the Linux VMs in a rather large vSphere environment spanning multiple vCenters (and the entire globe), and I wanted to include information about which virtual datacenter each VM lived in to make it easier to map VMs to their physical location.
I've got a Connect-vCenters function that I use to quickly log into multiple vCenters at once. That then enables me to run a single query across the entire landscape - but what query?
In case you missed the news, I recently migrated this blog from a site built with Jekyll to one built with Hugo. One of Hugo's cool features is the concept of Page Bundles, which bundle a page's resources together in one place instead of scattering them all over the place.
Let me illustrate this real quick-like. Focusing only on the content-generating portions of a Hugo site directory might look something like this:
I'm preparing to migrate this blog thingy from Hashnode (which has been great!) to a GitHub Pages site with Jekyll so that I can write posts locally and then just do a git push to publish them - and get some more practice using git in the process. Of course, I've written some admittedly-great content here and I don't want to abandon that.
Hashnode helpfully automatically backs up my posts in Markdown format to a private GitHub repo so it was easy to clone those into a local working directory, but all the embedded images were still hosted on Hashnode:
While working on my vRealize Automation 8 project, I wanted to let users specify how large a VM's system drive should be and have vRA apply that without any further user intervention. For instance, if the template has a 60GB C: drive and the user specifies that they want it to be 80GB, vRA will embiggen the new VM's VMDK to 80GB and then expand the guest file system to fill up the new free space.
In the same vein as my script to automagically resize a Linux LVM volume to use up free space on a disk, I wanted a way to automatically apply Windows updates for servers deployed by my vRealize Automation environment. I'm only really concerned with Windows Server 2019, which includes the built-in Windows Update Provider PowerShell module. So this could be as simple as Install-WUUpdates -Updates (Start-WUScan) to scan for and install any available updates.
I manage a large VMware environment spanning several individual vCenters, and I often need to run PowerCLI queries across the entire environment. I waste valuable seconds running Connect-ViServer and logging in for each and every vCenter I need to talk to. Wouldn't it be great if I could just log into all of them at once?
I can, and here's how I do it.
The Script The following Powershell script will let you define a list of vCenters to be accessed, securely store your credentials for each vCenter, log in to every vCenter with a single command, and also close the connections when they're no longer needed.
