Virtualize All the Things

Have you ever found yourself in a position where you’re freaking out about needing to get an ESXi host back up and running after being forced to wipe the hypervisor from the boot device? No? Well I have. But, if you’re anything like me, you’ve heard the three B’s of being an IT professional. Backups, backups, and ummm... oh, backups!

Let’s give VMware a round of applause here. ESXi 5.0-5.5 is a very stable hypervisor. While I’ve only been working as a consultant for 3 years and change, I’ve only come across one instance where I HAD to wipe an ESXi host in order to get it back up.

The client had two ESXi hosts running on an HP custom iso with ESXi 5.1 in a cluster and they needed to be upgraded to ESXi 5.5. Okay, no big deal right? Just simply upgrade vCenter and then move on to upgrading the hosts. Well I learned something that day, while this flow chart from vHersey might be right 99% of time, you still need to be good little boy and girl scouts and do backups before you make changes.

Basically, in a nutshell, if you tried to upgrade the host regardless if you use the HP ISO or the VMware generic ISO, the install would fail around 20% and roll back was not possible. The environment was very simple so a fresh install, some changes to networking and setting up iSCSI was all that needed to get everything inventoried and running again.

But I got to thinking, what about people who have more complex configs on their hosts and don’t have host profiles setup and for some reason are always making changes to the host configs? Well I thought this would be a good time to stretch my powershell legs and see what I’m capable of. So I present to you, my “Daily ESXi Backup Script”! It’s quick and dirty, but it gets the job done if you ever find yourself needing to backup multiple host configs at one time.

It’s a very basic script in that it will:

Load the powerCLI snap-in

Connect to your vCenter server with the credentials you define

Figures out the date

Creates a folder with today’s date

Exports all the configurations for all the hosts registered in vCenter to the folder and puts the results into a text document

It’s not a complex script, but it gets the job done if you’re goal is to retain daily backups. I will keep working on this script to add some fancy things such as sending an email when it’s done, setting a retention period before getting rid of older backups and more.

So without further adieu:

Pastebin Link

Github

Welcome to the one and hopefully only "Virtualize all the Things" website. I'm your host for the blog, Matt. I've created this blog with the purpose to reinforce my knowledge and love for all things virtualization.

A bit about me. At the time of this posting, I'm a 26 year old Managed Services Project Engineer. I've started my career in the lovely world of GeekSquad in 2007 and over time have moved into the MSP world presently.

Now folks, I'm not a super master guru of all things virtualization. I have however acquired a set of skills. A set of skills for all things hypervisor related and general sysadmining. And any neat tricks, tips, or weirdness, I will share with the world.

Hopefully you'll enjoy reading this blog as much as I enjoy finding out about new things and telling you about.

So come with me and you'll be in a world of pure virtualization.