d-fens GmbH
Audit and Consulting of Information Systems and Business Processes
I am a senior auditor, consultant and architect at d-fens for business processes and information systems.
Often you would like to customise one or two things with a script in one of the predefined workflow steps like ‘BuildingMachine’. However depending on your blueprint you do not […]
Imagine you feel like reinstalling your vCAC system as the DB got somehow corrupted and VMware support is not able to fix it. Although you really like the fancy GUI of the vCAC administration interface you somehow get bored to enter all your configuration options again and again … As usual, there is help: You can later import them via […]
Sometimes you want to have the user to be able to select a VLAN based on the location he chooses during a machine request. With some little logic you can actually create a DropDown box backed by a ValueExpression that lists all selected networks per location. You only have to enumerate all HostReservations, lookup the location of its related Compute […]
As an update to the previous post on doing a manual placement of VMs I would like to present a approach for a placement strategy in vCAC that is a […]
Did you ever want to quickly enumerate over all vCenters that are connected with vCAC? without storing hard coded credentials? and never worry when endpoints are added or removed? Here is how …
I updated the biz.dfch.PS.Storebox.Api for being able to have file transfers to and from Ctera (Storebox) via its REST API. There you will also find the link to the NuGet package and the Github repository. With it you can get a directory listing, download and upload a file. It uses our logging module as well as the generic ‘Invoke-CteraRestCommand’. There […]
In vCAC you can set a location on a ‘Compute Resource’. While in some cases this might not make sense (e.g. vCenter stretched clusters) you might still want to use it, for example to implement some placement logic. When you have a look at the object, you might be surprised to see, that there is no attribute of the corresponding […]
=== UPDATE 2014-10-19 === I created a separate module that uses the SqlClient where you do not have to specify the command type and where you can also use LocalDB connections. === For the full module and description see my Post Module: biz.dfch.PS.System.Data. === UPDATE 2013-12-21 === added an additional parameter to specify the command type manually === Sometimes we […]
[UPDATE 2014-02-16] For a different approach on how to change HostReservation and StorageReservation have a look at the method via RegisterExistingVirtualMachine().] One of the limitations in vCAC 5.2 is the […]
Warning: this post describes a feature where the developers probably might not have thought of when they designed it. Use on your own risk (as with any scripts we show you here). When using workflows to integrate with infrastructure outside the control of vCAC (like getting the next available IP address from your IPAM system) you might run into concurrency […]
This is a rather quick one and I am merely writing it down as I tend to forget … If you need a quick way to get a hex representation in string form (of a byte array or any string) you can use this fragment. You certainly can combine this with some hash computation if you do not want a […]
You have read all the blogs like Calling Powershell/PowerCLI Scripts from a vCAC workflow on how to call PowerShell scripts from vCAC or -if you really have to- vCO (when […]
Did you ever want your Cmdlets tp support pipeline input but never took the time to correctly implement it? There is an easy way of handling input either from pipeline or as a parameter (regardless it being a sigle object or an array of objects). You just have to decorate a generic input parameter with the “ValueFromPipeline” attribute and iterate […]
vCAC has the a built-in feature to define properties as drop down lists that can display information based on a selection of a different (parent) property (as described in the vCAC 5.2 Operating Guide). This is called a “ValueExpression”. Though this mechanism is a bit buggy and might even raise some security issues it is still quite useful in certain […]
I changed the way the biz.dfch.PS.System.Logging module implements its file writing by using log4net as the file logger. It makes use of the (static) FileAppender as the RollingFileAppender does not support concurrent access when rolling log files. So the log roll over is still handled within the PowerShell module directly (until I implement a custom lock for rolling the files […]
When you use vCAC with a CNAME and want to access the website /vCAC from the server itself you might actually notice that you can only access the website via “localhost” instead of the CNAME. This is actually a security feature of the Microsoft Internet Information Server that you can re-configure to adjust this behaviour. Just follow the artile You […]
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