PowerCLI Archives

vCenter ESXi Config Backup Script

July 6, 2024

When using VMware vCenter, you may only occasionally need a configuration backup of each VMware ESXi host. However, there are some situations where having a config backup of each ESXi host is nice to have.

I didn’t want to back up each ESXi host manually, as it doesn’t scale well. Instead, I created a PowerShell script called vCenter ESXi Config Backup to do everything for me.

You can find the script on my GitHub. https://github.com/thedxt/VMware#vcenter-esxi-config-backup

Prerequisites

VMware PowerCLI installed (here’s the Broadcom documentation on how to do that)
VMware vCenter certificate installed. My blog post, Install VMware vCenter Certificate in Windows, covers how to do this.

How It Works

The vCenter ESXi config backup script connects to VMware vCenter, uses vCenter to connect to each ESXi host, and takes a configuration backup for each host. Because the script uses vCenter, you don’t need to enable SSH on any of the ESXi hosts for the backup to work.

By default, the vCenter ESXi config backup script assumes you are not connected to vCenter and will prompt you to connect to vCenter. You can suppress this behavior if you are already connected to vCenter by setting the optional parameter named connected to the value of Yes.

The script checks to see if the backup folder you defined exists. If the folder does not exist, the script will create it.

Next, the vCenter ESXi config backup script enumerates all of the ESXi hosts in vCenter, it connects to each one and takes a configuration backup. The script outputs the backup into the folder you defined.

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Install VMware vCenter Certificate in Windows

May 31, 2024

The VMware vCenter root certificate is an essential part of vCenter. When you install vCenter, it also installs the VMCA (VMware Certificate Authority) in your vCenter. The VMCA is a barebones CA for vCenter that issues certificates to the various elements of vCenter as needed.

You should install the VMCA root certificate on your system because not all web browsers trust it. After installing the root certificate, your web browsers will trust the certificates on your ESXi hosts in your vCenter, as they use certificates issued by the VMCA on your vCenter.

Installing the VMware vCenter certificate will help prevent errors. Such as the invalid certificate error NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID.

The operation failed error is another one that can present itself when uploading files to a datastore.

Another error is the invalid server certificate error in PowerCLI.

Connect-VIServer

Error: Invalid server certificate.

Use Set-PowerCLIConfiguration to set the value for the InvalidCertificateAction option to Prompt if you'd like to connect once or to add a permanent exception for this server.

Additional Information: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority 'vcenter'.

At line:1 char:1
+ Connect-VIServer -Server "vcenter"
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo          : SecurityError: (:) [Connect-VIServer], ViSecurityNegotiationException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId :
Client20_ConnectivityServiceImpl_Reconnect_CertificateError, VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Cmdlets.Commands.ConnectVIServerCode language: plaintext (plaintext)

In this post, I will show you step-by-step how to install the VMware vCenter root certificate in Microsoft Windows.

The Process

Go to the URL of your vCenter.
Off to the right, there’s a link that says Download trusted root CA certificates.

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VMware Copy Paste Enabler

July 1, 2021

Something that has annoyed me with VMware when compared to Hyper-V is the fact that Hyper-V lets you paste into the VM console. By default VMware has that disabled but you can manually enable it. Doing that is kind of slow so I wrote a script with PowerCLI to enable copy paste on a VM.

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