Quick Post - PowerCLI Firewall Requirements

Last night I was working in an environment that has a reasonably well locked down NSX distributed firewall, and I was having some issues with PowerCLI. PowerCLI 10.2 on Windows, connecting to vCenter Server 6.7, to be specific. Port 443 was allowed from the jump host to vCenter Server, but I was seeing some odd issues still. I was trying to run an as built report for the environment, but I could not seem to establish a connection to NSX manager when running the script, and VUM cmdlets that are called in the script were also failing, such as:

PowerCLI Script to Power On or Off vSphere Lab

I was recently chatting to a few guys regarding powering on and off VMs within a vSphere lab and using a script to do so in some sort of controlled manner (or force power off everything if desired). A few of us had a quick search, and couldn’t see anything that met the requirements of being able to power on and power off the lab, as well as place VMs into some sort of priority group.

PowerCLI Functions - Get Raw Device Mappings and Set Perennial Reservations

Introduction Just a quick post to say I’ve written a couple of powershell functions to deal with Raw Device Mappings and perennial reservations within a vSphere environment. Although I do try to avoid them, some customers do still have RDMs in their environment, mostly for Microsoft failover clusters configured at the virtual machine layer. Some ad-hoc scripts exist for this at the moment, but I wanted to break out the ‘getting’ of RDMs and then setting them to perennially reserved.

PowerCLI Script- Configure ESXi Host for Connectivity to Nimble iSCSI SAN

So last week I noticed that a user by the name of Dean had opened a thread on the Nimble Connect forums with some handy PowerCLI to configure an ESXi host to connect to Nimble Storage arrays. I had done the same thing near the end of 2015 when we installed 6 Nimble Storage arrays in our environment, and I was meant to get around to putting it all together in a powershell function/script.