Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf did a great presentation on PowerCLI.

PowerCLI is based on PowerShell. PowerShell is designed by Microsoft with the SysAdmin in mind. It’s the universal language for Windows data centers.

Most of the time GUI interfaces are single purpose and rigid. PowerShell is the glue between your infrastructure. Microsoft makes it as a requirement for new application releases that it will work with PowerShell like SQL Server, Exchange, IIS7, SCOM and more. Commands (called cmdlets) are pretty easy to remember because they are in the verb-noun format (for example get-host)

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As with most products you want to keep them up to date for several reasons, which can include security, availability, reliability or even new features in the product. Keeping products up to date is a process that keeps repeating itself and needs a good plan to keep up with the most recent updates.

A lot of times though you will see that an organization isn’t on top of the update process, either because they aren’t aware of it or just forget to execute the tasks for updating their products.

The following BBC News article shows what might happen when you’re not keeping your system up to date. Several companies have become victims of the the Sasser virus which interrupted their normal operations.

Recently I have been doing a quick look at an VMware ESX infrastructure in which I noticed they did install the VMware update manager. They also had a baseline configured and attached to several ESX hosts and every evening there was a scheduled task to check for new updates available.

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Up until a week ago, I hadn’t had the pleasure to work a lot with vSphere. Now with a test environment at the customer site I was able to freely play a bit with vSphere. One of the features I was curious on trying was Fault Tolerance (FT). I just created a random VM and enabled FT on it which all went fine.

After FT was enabled on the VM we wanted to see how we could upgrade the ESX hosts in that cluster as the documentation states that FT only works on hosts with the same build number.

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Yesterday we did an upgrade from an ESX 3.5 host to ESX 4.0 using the VMware Upgrade Manager. I must say it’s cool to see how you can upgrade your ESX hosts and after that you can schedule the updates for your virtual machines with a virtual hardware upgrade version 7 and new VMware Tools.

There are some prerequisites for upgrading ESX 3.5 hosts to ESX 4.0 by using the VMware Upgrade Manager. Make sure you upgrade your vCenter server to vCenter Server 4.0 and make sure you have updated vCenter Update Manager 1.0 to version 4.0 before attempting to upgrade your ESX hosts.

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Recently I experienced problems with VMware Update Manager. When working with the virtual infrastructure the VI client suddenly displays a message stating that my session with VMware Update Manager was no longer valid and that the plugin would be unloaded. At first I suspected that network issues were the cause of the problem as at this client site we have separate vCenter and Update Manager servers for security reasons. So I created a affinity rule keeping both servers together to rule out network issues between the two servers. Unfortunately the error messages kept popping up. I had no idea what to do and was thinking about accepting this issue but this goes against my nature and pride. (more…)