Reporting on your Windows Server backup

A while ago I blogged about backing up my virtual home lab for free with Veeam Backup & Replication 10. The server on which I installed this is a Windows Server 2016 server that is also used for backing up my home PCs and laptops. And on this server I…

YAMS – Yet Another Migration Script

I was asked if I could write a script that could be used for moving VMs to another data center location. Sounds easy right? Well, there were some specific requirements that made it a bit more challenging… Downtime for the VMs should be kept to a minimum. Some clusters re-use…

Upgrading ESXi 6.0 hosts with PowerCLI

The last step in my migration project was to actually upgrade the hosts to a supported version. This means that all hosts are upgraded to 6.7 except for those hosts that are a bit to old and only support 6.5. For the upgrade, I used Update Manager to store the…

Migrating ESXi Hosts to Another vCenter Server

As part of a migration project, ESXi hosts needed to be migrated to a new vCenter appliance. The Cisco 1000v distributed virtual switch was stripped out and converted to standard switches. So basically it was a matter of disconnecting, and removing the hosts from the old vCenter and adding them…

Find a datastore or RDM by LUN ID

Sometimes the storage team wants to clean up their LUNs but they only know the LUN ID. And they ask you, the ESXi admin, where that LUN is used… Not an easy question if you don’t have an administration of your LUNs. You can use the UI and do some…

SCCM – Duplicate Device Records

A few days back I was investigating duplicate device records in SCCM. Basically, there are two major reasons for duplicate device records: Reinstalling a device Active Directory delta discovery For the first reason SCCM has some built-in solutions. In the Hierarchy Settings there’s an option for conflicting client records. This…

Powershell – looking up HP warranty information – part 2

Earlier I published a post about retrieving warranty information for HP hardware. However, the end date that is returned by the script might not always be correct! Let me explain… What the script does is executing a SOAP request to a website. The outcome of that request is XML data…