Adventures In PowerCLI

Every now and again I run into a situation where I have to copy files to virtual machines that are on an inaccessible network. With PowerCLI this can be handled easily using the Copy-VMGuestFile command. For the most part this works as it should but I have run into issues transferring files larger than 1 GB where the operation will timeout and will receive an error stating "The request was aborted: The request was canceled". After some research I found out that the default timeout for web operations in PowerCLI is 300 seconds which does include the Copy-VMGuestFile command.This timeout can be adjusted using the Set-PowerCLIConfiguration command with the WebOperationTimeoutSeconds option and using the -1 value as seen below. The value could also be increased to a greater number of seconds to get pass the timeout limitation it would take to complete the operation but for me it is easier just to disable it. For reference here is a link to the PowerCLI 11.4 Commands. htt

One of the most common configuration changes for monitoring and security purposes within any IT System is sending logs to a central location. I was tasked with making this change across multiple VCenter data centers with multiple ESXI hosts and as usual that is something I did not want to manually do as it is so time consuming. To also make things a little more interesting there were some hosts that were already configured but were not working so I had to write the PowerCLI script to check if it was configured and only restart the appropriate services.

Following a recent upgrade from VCenter 6.5 to 6.7 I ran into an issue with Windows VM deployments using Customization Specifications. The deployments kept failing with the error "The VCenter Server is unable to decrypt passwords stored in the customization specification." After some research I found out the this occurs because the encryption keys are updated during the VCenter upgrade and the passwords in the Customization Specs can no longer be decrypted.  Solution ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To resolve this issue I found out I would have to edit the Customization Spec and enter the passwords on the "Administrator Password" and "Workgroup or domain" tabs. Re-enter the local Administrator password in the Customization Spec. Re-enter the password for the Windows Domain account used to add servers to