Short security principles intro

One aspect of your vSphere environment that shouldn’t be ignored is the built-in security feature that allows you to control who can do what with which vSphere entity.

Internally this is controlled from the AuthorizationManager. This object contains all the properties and methods you need to configure and manage the built-in security system.

The principle how vSphere entities are protected is quite straightforward.

At the basis are the so-called privileges. Each privilege describes a basic action that can be performed on one or more of the vSphere entities.

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In Part1 of this article we had all the roles and permissions exported to an XML file. It’s now time to import the roles and permissions into a Virtual Center.

The script does in fact the reverse of what the script in Part 1 did.

But there were a few “gotchas“ that had to be solved before arriving at a working solution.

Duplicate Names

The script does not take into account that you can have different objects in your vSphere environment with the same name! Which imho is not a good practice in any case.

Should someone have the need for this functionality let me know and I will try to adapt the scripts.

Principals

The script does not create the principals that are mentioned in the XML file. If these principals do not exists in the environment where you want to import the roles and permissions the script will show errors.

Speed of execution

The permissions are set with an API called SetEntityPermissions.

As can be seen in the API Reference Guide this method requires a Managed Object Reference (MoRef) to a ManagedEntity. A ManagedEntity object is the parent object of most of the managed objects in vSphere.

This way of working avoids that there would have to be a separate method for each of the derived managed objects.

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Did you make the first Unofficial Online VMware User Group, well you sure missed a few things then, make sure you catch the video and sign up for the next one’s here

In the UOVMUG we were given an exclusive from Scott Herold of Quest who was giving a demo on the Virtualisation EcoShell, he showed us how you could produce highly customised great looking reports straight from the product, an enhanced version of vReport which is already available in the product.

He released this the next day on thevesi.org as an Action which can be downloaded and added to the existing version of the VES.

For step-by-step instructions on how to install this check out the article on the VES blog, for a preview of one of what you can do with the reports see below. Continue reading →

Ok, we all know what Storage VMotion is…

Enable live migration of virtual machine disk files across storage arrays. VMware Storage VMotion lets you relocate virtual machine disk files between and across shared storage locations while maintaining continuous service availability and complete transaction integrity.

VMware also give us some nice detail telling us how Storage VMotion works…

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PowerCLI is a great tool to manage your vSphere environment. No discussion about that!

The package contains cmdlets for, let’s say 80% of your vSphere day to day tasks, and for the missing 20% you can always fall back on the vSphere APIs (or ask in the PowerCLI community).

The only problem that pops up from time to time is the performance of some of the PowerCLI cmdlets.The Get-Vm cmdlet is one of these infamous cmdlets which, when executed in a decently sized (number of guests) vSphere environment, tends to be quite slow.

But as with the 80%-20% rule above, you can fall back on the vSphere APIs to speed things up a bit.
Add to that some medium to advanced PowerShell features and the time gains you can reach are impressive.

The problem at hand was that we needed a script to update a number of custom attributes on our guests.

A quick method of doing this would be something along these lines:

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Duncan recently posted a nice license script which checks every ESX Host for the availability of the license source, in his post he challenged me to write a script which checked the state of the license server service and sent an email if it was not running.

How could I let this pass without an answer, so I finally found time, the below script will get the license server from the VI server and then check to see if the license server service is running, if its not it will drop you an email, the idea of this is to run it as a scheduled task.

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Unless you have been living in a cave in the middle of the woods with no internet access you will know that today VMware released the long awaited and the worst kept secret of all time, vSphere.

Along with vSphere comes alot of other lowercase v starting words including vCompute, vNetwork, vStorage and vPowerCLI, actually hold on, they seam to have forgotten the v with this one, PowerCLI it is!  PowerCLI is the new look all improved VI Toolkit.

(Personally I love the name – much better than VI Tookit. Nice one C-Dawg !)

So what’s new ?

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