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Showing posts from December, 2017

Deploy Multiple VM's with PowerCLI and a vCenter Custom Spec.

This blog post assumes you have a working vCenter server with at least one host, datastore, network etc...requirements are listed below:  What is required:  Admin access to a running vCenter environment, preferably a lab! Powershell v5 and PowerCLI 6.5. A premade template, EG Windows Server 2016. A vCenter custom spec for the configuration of guest operating systems. Details of my lab are below. I am fortunate to have access to real servers where I work but a computer with enough disk space and maybe 16gb of ram will suffice. You may not be able to run as much simultaneously. My Lab: Dell PowerEdge server 128GB RAM VMware Workstation Pro 12 3 Virtual Machines located inside VMware Workstation.  2 ESXi Servers, 1 Active Directory domain controller. My vCenter server appliance (VCSA.contoso.com) is running on one of my virtual ESXi servers. The Environment: Active Directory and DNS: 10.1.1.1 DHCP provided by VMware workstation network manager. vCenter Se

VM NIC is disconnected after deploying from a Template

Today I had a problem deploying some virtual machines and applying a custom spec to them in vCenter server 6.5. It turns out the virtual machine hardware on the VM I cloned as a template, was OLD and needed updating. Check to make sure your VM Tools installation is also upto date!