Situation:- 100 CPU based SRM License for our environment.

Problem – VMware changes their Licensing model from CPU based to VM based.

Solution:- Spoke to VMware Licensing support about this issue. They were ready to cover 5 VMs per CPU License what we had purchased. I am not sure, from where they got this number. I think there are so many factors which determines the number of VMs per CPU. Factors like – Hardware, CPU, memory etc…I spoke with VMware about this issue and after showing the numbers of VMs in our environment, they readily agreed to cover more than VMs for per processor purchased.

So, earlier we were going to get almost – 100*5=500 VMs protection

Now, we are going to get 100*12=1200 VMs.

Thanks VMware Support for quick resolution !!!

Magic Thumb™ is a fantastic way to enlarge thumnbail images using a JavaScript lightbox effect.

They have a very good support. I had some issues configuring it and they helped me out.

During the course of my powershell learning, I realised this little one line script can help us to retrieve Hardware version from all the powered-on VMs which are running on old hardware version i.e version 4.

Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.PowerState -eq PoweredOn} | Where-Object {$_.version -lt "v7"}

Get hardware version

Click to enlarge

Today, in out office we were facing a interesting problem. Every now and then one of the VM will timeout. This was causing lot of issues. The VM was in production. This VM was created few days ago and everything was running fine. We were not sure what was causing the problem.
We looked at couple of things like ;-

1. Network issue
2. Switch issue
3. May be the VMware tools had a problem this VM is using VMXNet3 adapter.
4. Logged a call with VMware support and they wanted config logs for Networking switches – Network Manager was not at all happy when he heard that.

I just realized may be there might be a Duplicate MAC somewhere on the network that might be causing this problem. Here comes powershell to rescue. Did a google and found this nice script , from vNugglets which can tell us if there are any duplicate address on the network.

After running the script, we did find that there was indeed duplicate MAC address on the network which was causing this issue.
Thanks for the script it saved us lot of time.

On a side note :- I was wondering if there are duplicate MAC address across multiple VCenter Server, how are we going to troubleshoot that. Need to do some research to get answer to that question.

I am still new to powershell everyday I learn something new about it. Today, while going through the manuals, I noticed a interesting cmdlet called "Enter-PSSession"
 

Description

The Enter-PSSession cmdlet starts an interactive session with a single remote computer. During the session, the commands that you type run on the remote computer, just as though you were typing directly on the remote computer. You can have only one interactive session at a time.
Typically, you use the ComputerName parameter to specify the name of the remote computer. However, you can also use a session that you create by using New-PSSession for the interactive session.
To end the interactive session and disconnect from the remote computer, use the Exit-PSSession cmdlet, or type "exit".

I was having trouble making this cmd work. Every time, I used to get the following error message

PS K:\> Enter-PSSession -computername 10.0.0.1 -credential USA\administrator
Enter-PSSession : Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot process the request. Default authentication may be used w
ith an IP address under the following conditions: the transport is HTTPS or the destination is in the TrustedHosts list, and explicit credentials are provided. Use winrm
.cmd to configure TrustedHosts. Note that computers in the TrustedHosts list might not be authenticated. For more information on how to set TrustedHosts run the followin
g command: winrm help config. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.
At line:1 char:16
+ Enter-PSSession <<<<  -computername 10.0.0.1 -credential USA\administrator
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (10.0.0.1:String) [Enter-PSSession], PSRemotingTransportException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CreateRemoteRunspaceFailed

After looking at help manuals and Google I found, using the following cmd "winrm quickconfig" at Powershell prompt on the destination computer will do the trick. It will enable firewall exceptions and will accept WS-Man requests to any IP on this machine.
I would like to have firewall exceptions just for few Ip Address and not "ANY IP address". Will have to do more research on this topic. Perhaps it warrents for another blogpost.

PS K:\> Enter-PSSession corp
[corp]: PS C:\Users\TOM\Documents>

All though I have not tested it throughtly, but I think there is lot of potential to use this cmd-let for day to day troubleshooting specially if you need to quickly connect to vcenter server OR some other server and want to have the link to the log files Or services that are running on the computer for example:-

To get a quick look at the services that are running for vmware

[corp]: PS C:\> Get-Service | Where-Object {$_.Displayname -like '*vm*'}

Status   Name               DisplayName
——        —-                     ———–
Running  ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS  VMwareVCMSDS
Stopped  vCOConfiguration   VMware vCenter Orchestrator Configu…
Running  vctomcat           VMware VirtualCenter Management Web…
Running  vimPBSM            VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Stora…
Running  VMTools            VMware Tools Service
Stopped  vmvss              VMware Snapshot Provider
Running  vpxd               VMware VirtualCenter Server

[corp]: PS C:\>