Well, if you haven’t already figured out I’m big on shell scripts and Unix/Linux in general, so when my company informed me that they needed to bring down one of our NetApp FAS clusters for system maintenance, the wheels in my head started turning.  I’m sorry this isn’t in our beloved Powershell scripting language, but I’m old school and needed to write a shell based script to gracefully shutdown all my virtual machines.

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Posted under ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips

Sometimes you need to script a job that SSH’s into another ESX host, problem is you will be prompted for a password—pretty much taking out all the automation aspect of a script.

There is a way around this.  Simply generate a public SSH key and place it in an authorized_keys file on your 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. ESX host.

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Posted under ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips, Security

Scott Lowe covered this over two years ago but I thought I’d revisit just in case there is someone out there looking to SSH from their ESX hosts directly into the NetApp OnTAP operating system.

By default, ESX only supports AES encryption, OnTAP requires 3DES encryption. This means we’ll need to make a modification to the SSH configuration on ESX to have it support 3DES.  If your asking why would I want this, sometimes it comes in real handy to run OnTAP commands direct from your ESX command-line.  For example, if you want to see how much space an aggregate has left you can simply type; ssh fas1 df -Ag aggr0 — or if you want to grow the size of your LUN; ssh fas1 lun resize /vol/vol#/qtree/lun# 500g — Anyways, the possibilities are endless.

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Posted under ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips, NetApp

Here is a brief write-up on how to access the Service Console of VMware ESXi. As a disclaimer, this should only be done under the direct supervision of a VMware Support Engineer.

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Posted under ESXi 3.5 Tips, VMware

UPDATE: I have re-written this script for enhancements, these can be found on the post titled “NetApp Snapshots in ESX - Take 2“

Many of you NetApp/ESX users should know by now that SnapManager for VI has been released. Many of you should also know that NetApp’s costs of licensing such tools can be fairly pricey. For those of us that can’t afford or justify the purchase of SMVI, I give to you a very handy script that I wrote….

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Posted under Backup & Recovery, ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips, NetApp, Storage, VMware