Being a sysadmin often means doing some boring stuff on a daily basis. Well, sure, you can use PowerCLI to save yourself the hassle. It’s a powerful tool that I believe any vSphere admin should master at some point. While PowerCLI provides you the ultimate freedom of IT infrastructure management, there’s still a workaround to automate some tasks even through GUI.

For instance, you need, let’s say, to take a VM snapshot regularly, but you cannot write a script for that purpose yet. You still can automate that process and some other tasks with vCenter Server inbuilt task scheduler. No vCenter? No problems, you can schedule some processes on ESXi! The only thing is that you may be limited to the guest OS inbuilt scheduler capabilities. For more freedom, you need some PowerShell and PowerCLI skills. In today’s article, I look through some tasks that you can automate with vCenter and teach you how to schedule them.

A couple of days ago, I decided to re-distribute VM resource shares. I, basically, wanted several VMs to get some more resource without compromising their latency. For that purpose, I played around with Storage I/O Control parameters a bit. And, you know, I decided to look at things more globally. Actually, here’s how I decided to take a deeper dive into I/O filtering. In today’s article, I’m going to tell you about the VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) framework providing the direct access to the to the VM I/O stream. I shed light on how to enable those filters, how they work, and why you need them.

Sometimes, you need your VMs to access a LUN directly over iSCSI. Direct access comes in handy when you, let’s say, run SAN/NAS-aware applications on vSphere VMs, or if you’re going to deploy some hardware-specific SCSI commands. Also, with direct access, physical-to-virtual conversion becomes possible without migrating a massive LUN to VMDK. Whatever. To enable your VMs to talk directly to LUN, you need a raw device mapping file. Recently, I created vSphere VMs with such disks. Well, apparently, this case is not unique, so I decided to share my experience in today’s article.

These days, hyperconverged solutions become increasingly prevalent in small- and medium-size datacenters. And, there’s no wonder: hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) provide decent reliability and set of features typically associated with large datacenters… but for less money! So, why pay more?

Leakage of confidential business information can become a true disaster for any company. Therefore, data security is an issue of prime importance for most of companies. Organizing an IT infrastructure, administrators’ top question is how to warrant a secure storage to keep sensitive business information. In this article, I suggest having a closer look at a relatively recent method of ensuring data security – VMware virtual machines encryption that can become a good remedy against intruders for your organization.

One day, any virtual infrastructure needs to be updated. That may be just due to admin’s wish to keep up with modern trends or the need for some cool features that are brought to life with the latest updates. And, speaking of updates, VMware has recently released their vSphere 6.5 U2. Find out more details about it in this document:

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsphere/vmware-vsphere-feature-comparison-datasheet.pdf

So, being a VMware fan, I decided to update my vSphere 6.5 and describe the entire update process from its planning through the installation itself.

There are various tricks and hints we all use to make our daily system administration routines easier. One of them is virtual machine cloning provided by VMware vCenter Server. Great and simple thing allowing you to deploy many identical virtual machines to a group – no need to repeat the same process all over again. This is usually done in vCenter but there are several other ways you can go if it becomes unavailable.

Recently, I decided to automate some boring routine procedures related to setting up virtual networks in ESXi 6.5. That’s right, I’m talking about PowerCLI. This command-line tools allows automating all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, VM and so on and so forth. Sure, I had to dig into the details of orchestrating ESXi with PowerCLI. Yep, it took me some time but at the end of the day, the knowledge and experience I acquired paid back! Apparently, this case is not unique, so I decided to share my experience in today’s scribbling.

What was a privilege of enterprises just a few years ago, now becomes a common thing for companies of all sizes – I’m talking about cloud. The number of cloud storage providers grows, delivering various solutions that fit the needs of different organizations in terms of features and prices. Moreover, the competition in the cloud market is getting tougher, making cloud storage providers cut their prices just to stay afloat. Therefore, cloud becomes a really great alternative to purchasing more physical storage or compute resources to maintain data and applications. However, despite there is a wide range of cloud offerings, we still struggle with choosing a cloud provider that offers us storage we need without charging us a steep price in the end of the billing period. So today, we’ll have a closer look at some public cloud providers to decide on the cheapest storage.