Experienced this issue a month or so back (ended up logging a call with VMware to get confirmation of what happened) and it occurred again today so figured it was worth posting about. If you receive the following error when attempting to log into vCenter 5.1 with an AD account: A general system error occurred: Authorize Exception there are a number of potential issues. however most likely it is related to SSO and one of the Identity Sources.

Having recently enabled Storage DRS in a vSphere 5.1 environment we began to see a lot of the following errors in vCenter: The device or operation specified at index ‘x’ is not supported for the current virtual machine version ‘vmx-04’. A minimum version of ‘vmx-06’ is required for this operation to succeed The host(s) running the VM(s) in question contained the error matched in this VMware KB article: [2009-07-10 14:13:41.632 F638BB90 info ‘vm:/vmfs/volumes/4a56e6c2-9319e3df-f1af-001e0bea4030/RVHOLS029/RVHOLS029.

This one tripped me up earlier in the week, so thought it was worth sharing in case you hit the same issue sometime. In PowerShell v2 and earlier when using Get-Credential to save credentials into a variable and NOT using a full Windows domain credential, e.g. something like: instead of a more Windows style credential: then the resultant stored credential prepends a \ in front of the username: $cred = Get-Credential PS C:\\> $cred UserName Password -------- -------- \\root System.

I recently experienced an issue adding a vSphere 5.1 host to vCenter while using the Add-VMHost cmdlet in PowerCLI. I’m pretty sure the same problem would have occured if I was using the GUI, but this work was for part of some automated deployment work. On a freshly baked ESXi 5.1 install one of the first tasks is to get it into vCenter. However, this was failing with what initially appeared to be a license issue, despite there being plenty of available licenses.

After upgrading a Cisco UCS C210 M2 rack mount server to ESXi 5.1 and then ESXi patches from 25/07/2013 the host was stuck at ‘Initializing scheduler….’ I had checked my firmware version was satisfactory for ESXi 5.1 but found reports suggesting this (intermittent) issue has been around for a while with earlier versions of ESXi, different versions of UCS models and firmware and maybe HP models too. Before trying the suggested workaround of disabling legacy USB support, I decided to get the box up to the latest firmware.

A question I’ve fielded now and again in the past, “Can I use PowerShell to access Linux servers?”. Among others, there were a few answers I could give of varying degrees of usefulness depending on the requirements: Use the command line tool plink.exe Look at OMI I was recently asked this again at my current workplace and discovered a project I hadn’t seen previously, a PowerShell module based on the SSH.

A colleague of mine demonstrated this for me yesterday while we were troubleshooting which physical NIC out of 8 in a rack mount server matched up to which vminc (0 - 7) in vSphere. Tougher than you might think when vmnic6 and 7 mapped to the onboard physical NICs 1 and 2! Using the command line tool ethtool you can make each vmnic blink for a specified period of seconds allowing you to identify which port on the back of the server it maps to.

A colleague asked me whether it was possible to clone a VM from a particular snapshot. Since there is no capability to do this via the GUI, I looked at what was possible via other means, i.e. PowerCLI. The vSphere API contains a Clone_VM task, which includes the ability to specify a snapshot to clone from in the VirtualMachineCloneSpec. So I put together the below New-VMFromSnapshot function to make this easy to do for a few different scenarios - it supports multiple snapshots to choose from, full and linked clones, and multiple destinations such as cluster, datastore, VM folder:

I’m very pleased to announce that the book I contributed a chapter to, PowerShell Deep Dives, has been published! It’s available as a pre-order for the paper version, the electronic version is available now, with ePub and Kindle versions to follow soon. Congratulations to my fellow editors and authors; some many great contributions from the PowerShell community: Editors Jeffery Hicks, Richard Siddaway, Oisín Grehan, and Aleksandar Nikolić are joined by PowerShell experts Chris Bellée, Bartek Bielawski, Robert C.

We were fortunate enough to get a bit of a scoop on the latest episode of GetScripting . Not only did we have chance to talk to Luc Dekens about recently becoming a PowerShell MVP, but he also gave us a bit of a scoop about his upcoming new book (due out in 2014), vSphere Performance Reporting with PowerCLI . Hopefully they’ll change the cover typo by the time it gets printed :-)