2016

ESXi Offline Bundle

In many environments after installing the stock ESXI image you end up wanting perform an update with the latest patches, update drivers and maybe even remove drivers. VMware’s Image Builder PowerCLI cmdlets provide a method of taking a stock ESXI image and performing such tasks, resulting in a customised ISO that’s ready for deployment, hopefully
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Ultimate Desktop Virtualization Best Practices Guide

I recently had a few of my suggestions featured in the community sourced Ultimate Desktop Virtualization Best Practices Guide. Grab your free copy now if you haven’t already! “The first Desktop Virtualization Best Practices Guide created by leading industry and community experts is now available for download! The guide is truly amazing with more than
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Taking my last post on page sharing a little further and inspired by @VBrianGraf & @vmMarkA’s Intra TPS Host Memory Assessment tool, I wanted to create a script that would calculate the memory savings gained from inter-VM page sharing directly from the statistics available in vCenter. In my last post I showed the values that
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esxtop memory statistics

With an upcoming upgrade to vSphere 6 on the horizon, the subject of Transparent Page Sharing came to mind again and also the fact that I’ve had a post in draft kicking around for quite a while. Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) is a memory saving technique employed by the ESXi hypervisor to reduce memory consumption
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I previously wrote a poston enabling Powershell Remoting over HTTPS. This has led to be carrying out a little more investigation on the security and certification considerations. For example, when creating the HTTPS listener the thumbprint is specified, but what happens when the certificate is renewed and the thumbprint changes? As a quick recap, we
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Up until now I’ve written most of my Powershell scripts to run sequentially; query one machine, then the next, then the one after. Depending on the task at hand and / or the number of machines this can take a serious amount of time. Enter parallelism. Jobs, Runspaces etc are concepts that I have been
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Further Reading: I wrote a follow up article called Powershell Remoting where I look at what happens when the certificate renews or gets deleted. The outcome is not what you’d think! If you are going to use the View PowerCLI Cmdlets then enabling and using Powershell Remoting makes it a whole lot more accessible, otherwise you have to
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