Tagged: ESXi

Create a nested ESXi template in vSphere

Nested Hosts are a great way to try new features out and can be quickly provisioned/removed in a home lab or test environment.  There is no official VMware support for them however so please no production use. Anyway, using nested hosts is certainly not new – William Lam is the go-to for this and has a load of consumable resources which can be found on his excellent website here.  However, like many, I wanted to have a go myself so here is how I created a template in my lab. For starters let’s get an ESXi VM created.  I’m not...

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vSphere 7 – ESXi upgrade

So having upgraded vCenter it’s time to do the hosts.  I’d normally use Update Manager for this – which has had an overhaul and is now Lifecycle Manager. One thing to call out here is that I ran a test prior to upgrading my hosts by installing the hypervisor onto a USB stick and booting from that to make sure there were no hardware issues.  I used remote management to attach the iso to the host and plugged in a USB key to install vSphere 7 onto.  If you don’t have remote management the same can be achieved by creating...

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Documentation – vSphere Clusters

I have put this function together for the purpose of documenting cluster settings.  Used it a fair bit to gather information on environments that I have come accross that have not been well documented.  In can be used as is but I’m fiddling around with it to produce some further information so likely to be updated in the near future. Hopefully of some use – connect to vCenter from POWERCLI and run the function. get-clusterdetails  

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Managing ESXi Hosts with AD Credentials

As part of a security hardening exercise or indeed just because, it may be desirable to change the root account of your ESXi hosts to a complex password, bung it in a safe and let you admins connect via their AD credentials. To start with, join your ESXi hosts to your AD domain.  I have pre-created computer objects in my test environment. I have also created an ESX Admins AD security group which by default allows its members admin access to an ESXi host once it has been joined to the domain. To join the domain run the following powercli...

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