PowerCLI: Get All Snapshot Information
KB ID 0001690 Problem This was asked on EE today, and it was an interesting one so I wrote it up. How to locate all the Snapshots in your VMware virtual infrastructure, and see how much space they are taking. Solution Use the following PowerCLI; Get-Snapshot * | Select-Object -Property VM, Name, SizeGB, Children | Sort-Object -Property sizeGB -Descending | ft -AutoSize Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links...
VMware Converter ‘A file I/O Error Occurred’
KB ID 0001688 Problem It seems every time I use VMware Converter, there’s some new error that jumps up and makes me stumble! Yesterday the problem was; FAILED: A file I/O error occurred while accessing Solution Some searching told me this is actually a DNS problem, (where the converter could not resolve the DNS name of the machine being converted). BUT I had put the FQDN directly into this machines ‘hosts file’ so I...
vSphere: Get ESX Server Serial Numbers
KB ID 0001670 Problem A few weeks ago I needed to sort out some extended warranty for a customers servers. To do that I needed the serial numbers of those servers, (a mixture of IBM/Lenovo and Dell Servers). As I didn’t fancy a drive to two different datacenters, I wanted to try and get them programatically. Solution After some searching I came across a post by one of my old EE buddies LucD with exactly what I needed. I’m...
VMware Edge Gateway VPN to Cisco ASA
KB ID 0001658 Problem I was asked to setup a VPN to help out a colleague this week. When I had a look, one end turned out to be an Edge Gateway, I wasn’t that concerned, I’d done similar things in my prior role, I just didn’t have access to the vCloud or VMware at this datacenter. Depite my best efforts on the ASA, the tunnel refused to come up, it took a little looking ‘under the covers’ to accurately...
DHCP Scope: Full of BAD_ADDRESS Entries
KB ID 0001651 Problem I had a client machine struggling to get an DHCP address, and when I looked in DHCP the scope it was full of this; BAD_ADDRESS This address Is Already in Use Solution A tour of Google and forums is full of posts by people with this problem, and other than, ‘Oh I looked in the logs and fixed it’ (with no mention of what log, or where this log was), or ‘Yeah I used Wireshark and located a problem...
Resizing (Shrinking) Drives With VMware Standalone Converter
KB ID 0000185 Problem Using: vSphere 6.7 and VMware Standalone Converter Version 6.2.0 I’m performing this procedure on vSphere 6.7, back ith the release of vSphere 5, This process changed, with vSphere 4 and VI3, you had to install VMware Converter on the vCenter Server then download and enable the plugin in your VI client software (like this). VMware now only has the “standalone converter”, so now you DONT install...
Adding Windows Server NFS Shares to VMware ESX
KB ID 0000319 Problem You have a Windows 2019/2016, 2012, or 2008 server with plenty of storage space, and you would like to present that to an ESX/ESXi server as a datastore. You can configure a folder (or drive) as an NFS share and present it to VMware vSphere, so that it can be used as a datastore. Note: For Server 2008 and vSphere 4/5 Scroll down. Create NFS Shares on Windows Server 2019, 2016, and 2012 Essentially you need to add...
VMware: List/Audit VMware Tools Versions
KB ID 0001618 Problem If you want to either audit, or simply get a quick list of which of your VMs are running which versions of VMware Tools, here are a few options. Show VMware Tools Versions With PowerCLI Use the following Syntax Get-VM | Select-Object -Property Name,@{Name=’ToolsVersion’;Expression={$_.Guest.ToolsVersion}} Like so; Show VMware Tools Versions With VI Client Using HTML Client To Show VMware Tools...
VMware: Install PowerCLI
KB ID 0001606 Problem There was a time you had to go to VMware and download PowerCLI then install it, that’s no longer the case, any machine with a, (reasonably new) version of PowerShell can simply pull the commandlets down from a repository and you are ready to go. Solution Firstly if you have the ‘old version’ of PowerCLI you can uninstall it from Add/Remove programs (appwiz.exe). Before installing, you need to be...
PowerCLI: Connect-VIServer Certificate Errors
KB ID 0001603 Problem When attempting to connect to a vCenter or ESXi host, you see the following error; Connect-VIServer : {Date} {Time} Connect-VIServer Error: Invalid server certificate. Use Set-PowerCLIConfiguration to set the value for the InvalidCertificateAction option to Prompt if you’d like to connect once or to add a permanent exception for this server. Additional Information: Could not establish trust relationship...