A recent Slack chat reminded me that PowerShell’s Get-Command cmdlet is a good way of finding what commands to use when you encounter a new problem. However it goes beyond typing Get-Command and just getting a huge list back- my laptop just gave me 7659 commands to choose from – as this can be unusable. Here’s some …
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For over a year now I’ve been using Microsoft’s To-Do application to manage and organise my tasks. This has probably been the longest I’ve stuck with a personal task manager for some time, and I believe the app has just the right amount of features for me, sitting somewhere between Outlook tasks and a …
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A colleague recently popped in a support request after noticing that the Calculator app wasn’t installed on their computer. This prompted an office discussion on how else you can solve sums when sat in front of a computer, and I mentioned you could just use PowerShell.
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A quick script that came up in response to a situation where I wanted to know the date a workstation on the network was last built without visiting the machine or interrupting the currently logged on user. PowerShell to the rescue!
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Symptoms

• vCenter (in my case VCSA 6.5 ) is not sending alert emails even though the mail server appears to be configured properly (in the vSphere Web Client this is on the vCenter node under Configure, Settings, General).
• Network connectivity between vCenter and port 25 on the SMTP server is fine and has been tested.

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I’m using vSphere Replication to replicate a number of VMs to a datastore which is being decommissioned. I can’t reconfigure replication by code (I’ve mentioned that there’s no public API or PowerCLI around the vSphere Replication functionality in vSphere 6.5 before- most recently on Twitter) …

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vSAN licenses are assigned per-cluster, so whilst the total number of vSAN licenses in a vCenter inventory might match the total number of vSAN host CPUs, they may not be assigned correctly to the clusters.
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A quick note on an issue I spotted in VMware vSphere 6.5 when creating a new content Library.
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Support for Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 ends in January 2020- just two years from the date of this post. Four years ago I put up a script to find XP and 2003 VMs, and I’ve modified this to search a vSphere environment for powered on VMs running Server 2008 as a Guest OS: 1Get-VM | 2 Where {$_.PowerState -eq …

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