Need to create a random password in vCO, maybe to be able to create a user account in Active Directory or elsewhere? I created an action for this task which can be reused in any workflow. The code for this is below.
There’s one input passwordLength to determine how long you want the password to be.
The action can be used in a workflow like so:
Alternatively, you can download the action to import into your own vCO install from my vCOModules repository on GitHub, where I’m beginning to store modules of generic actions I use.
Those great guys down in the South West of England, @mpoore, @jeremybowman, @virtualisedreal and @simoneady have kindly invited me down to their next VMUG to present about automation. So I will be talking about some of my experiences in automation projects from the last few years and particularly how to write your own code in a generic way so that it is portable across different projects and systems.
It looks like there is plenty of other good content lined up that day so I’d suggest you get down there too.
While using the Create a user group in an organizational unit Active Directory workflow in vCenter Orchestrator 5.5.1 I noticed an unexpected result after the group had been created in AD.
Although the group was successfully created, the SamAccountName attribute appeared to have been populated with a seemingly random string and not the name of the group as I would have expected.
Apart from being a bit inconsistent for my liking this could have potentially undesired results from applications querying AD using the SamAccountName property.
The agenda for the next London VMUG on Thursday May 15th has been published with the usual wide variety of excellent topics. I highly recommend you attend this event if you have an interest in virtualisation and are able to make it.
I’d also like to draw your attention to something called FeedForward. I saw some online conversation around this via Mike Laverick. Essentially, if you have ever thought about presenting at an event like a VMUG, but are not sure where to get started or maybe just looking for some advice on presenting at such an event or want do carry out a dry run, then this might be for you.
I was fortunate enough to receive a preview copy of Networking forVMware Administrators, so bear that in mind when reading this review. However, I found it to be such a useful source of information that I would more than happily purchase my own copy. Having arrived at VMware virtualisation a few years ago from a background in Enterprise IT, this is a book I wish had been available back then.
While setting up vCAC 6.0 in my home lab, I encountered the following error when trying to deploy a machine from a blueprint.
Error requesting machine. Inner Exception: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. Base Exception: The partner transaction manager has disabled its support for remote/network transactions. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8004D025)
I found a VMware KB article for an earlier version along similar lines which requires configuring some MSDTC settings on the SQL server holding the vCAC database.
As part of my preparation for the VCAP5-DCA I needed to sharpen up a bit in some of the cmdline areas that I wasn’t overly familiar with. Listed in the blueprint for the exam are areas such as creating storage claimrules with esxcli, using vscsiStats or creating ESXi Image builds.
Some of these cmdline tools are more discoverable than others and while you aren’t required to memorise how they all work since you have the documentation available in the exam, you won’t really have time to look it up.
I was experiencing some issues running Office 2013 64-bit inside a Windows 7 64-bit VM in VMware Fusion 6. In particular Word crashing more than Word in Office for Mac (which is saying something) and Excel barely usable, crashing often less than a couple of minutes after being started.
Some research led me to this VMware Communities post and other similar suggestions around turning on Disable hardware graphics acceleration and turning off Use subpixel positioning to smooth fonts on screen.
I needed to connect two external monitors to my MacBook Pro and use them with a Windows VM inside Fusion 6. Initially when I connected both, Windows would only recognise one of the external monitors, seemingly dependent on which was connected first.
A communities posting revealed a similar issue along these lines. Essentially the automatic detection of the monitors was not working correctly and the suggestion was to power down the VM and update the VM’s vmx file with the below:
During setting up an iSCSI LUN on my new Synology box (DSM 4.3), I encountered an issue where the first ESXi box would connect successfully to the iSCSI target, but not the second. So no devices showing on the second node after configuring the iSCSI adapter, despite no apparent errors during the config process.
Looking at the Synology box showed the first ESXi node connected (172.20.0.210), but not the second.