The Small Human Cloud

Virtualisation and General Technology Thoughts

Getting Started With Packer to Create vSphere Templates - Part 1

Virtual Machines Templates, why? Templates are a great way to achieve consistent, repeatable and fast virtual machine (VM) deployments, be it an on-premise vSphere environment or …

Upgrading Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 8.3.1 to 8.4

I recently started looking at prerequisites to a vSphere 7 upgrade, by reviewing any associated upgrades that might be needed. VMware Site Recovery Manager was one product that …

Upgrade vRealize Operations Manager (vROPS) 7.5 to 8.4

Recently I tested a vRealize Operation Manager (vROps) upgrade from version 7.5 to 8.4 ahead of a vCenter 7.0.2 upgrade and thought I would share the process. Something worth …

Updating PowerCLI and Cleaning Up Old Versions

Following the recent PowerCLI 12.3 release, I’m sure many will be rushing to make use of some of the great new additions which you can find information on here. I thought I …

Enabling Native KMS in vSphere 7.0 Update 2

Some time back I wrote about setting up and enabling a HyTrust Key Management setup for vSphere to make use of VM and vSAN encryption. Following the release of vSphere 7.0 Update …

Get, Set and Remove Perennial Reservations Using PowerShell Functions

Having recently had to do some work with RDM perennial reservations I looked into ways to make this less of a manual headache. There are plenty of examples out there for doing …

Administering ESXi Hosts With ESXCLI using PowerCLI

There are times as a vSphere admin, you are going to want to run ESXCLI commands against multiple ESXi Hosts from a central location. This could be for configuration / …

Deploying vCenter 7.0 via the CLI

Recently I decided it was time to add a second vCenter 7.0 Appliance to my main lab environment after the lab containing my SRM and vSphere Replication installation ceased to …

Using Tags To Automate The Assigning Of vCenter Object Permissions

Tags are a really useful component in VMware. They can be used for all manor of things, whether it’s for storage policies, backups, identifying a group of objects or in the …