Matt Vogt
I racked my 2 new EqualLogic PS6100E SANs today, furthering my belief that storage is sexy.
Virtualization, Storage, Community
A personal view of the Virtualization, Storage and Sys Admin worlds and the communities that love them by Matt Vogt.
HP Cloud Tech Day
I had the privilege of attending an HP Cloud Tech Day this past week in Houston, organized by Ivy Communications. Tom, Chris and Halley did a great job gathering some pretty cool and smart bloggers and thinkers to hear about and give feedback on HP's cloud offerings and aspirations. The list of attendees were:
Patrick Pushor
@CloudChronicle
Christopher White
@Fezmid
Rich Miller
@datacenter
Phillip Sellers
@pbsellers
Phillip Jaenke
@rootwyrm
Bob Stein
@ActiveWin
John Obeto
@JohnObeto
Chris Wahl
@chriswahl
Frank Owen
@fowen
Michael Letschin
@mletschin
Ofir Nachmani
@iamondemand
I highly recommend you check out their stuff. Super smart guys. A great mix, too, of sys admins, cloud evangelists, service providers, etc. I'll follow up with some specific posts about the topics we covered while I was there, but here's what we covered in day 1: HP Enterprise Business Cloud Strategy, HP View of Cloud Futures, Hyperscale for Cloud, Inner Workings and Building of a CloudSystem Infrastructure, Performance Optimized Datacenter Overview and Tour. Overall I was quite impressed. My regret is that I could only attend one full day. I will be following the rest of the action on Twitter (hash tag #hpci) and on www.hp.com/go/hpcloudday (live video, twitter feed and chat).
Posted
by Matt Vogt
Find Old Computers - Using PowerShell with LastLogonTimestamp
Cleaning up Active Directory is a necessary evil. You need to stay under your CAL count and it can be difficult to figure out which computers (or users) have not logged in to the domain recently.
Windows Server 2003 introduced the lastLogonTimestamp attribute which replicates between all DCs in the domain. Now, this isn’t a real-time data, in fact it can be up to 14 days behind the current date, depending on your domain settings. If you want that, you’re going to have to get yourself a good syslog server, but for general cleanup and auditing purposes it works great. You can read more about this attribute on Microsoft's TechNet Blog.
I’ve written a couple very simple PowerShell scripts that will 1) search the entire domain for all computers with a lastLogonTimestamp before a certain date 2) return a computers lastLogonTimestamp in a human readable local format. It’s not so easy to just go out and get the time stamp, because the format that AD stores it UTC (GMT) format, so it needs some converting to human readable, which my scripts do.
get_lastLogonTimestamp_from_host.ps1
# Gets host and lastLogonTimestamp in UTC of specified host
# get Name
$hostname=Read-host "Enter a hostname"
#grab the lastLogonTimestamp attributeGet-ADComputer $hostname -Properties lastlogontimestamp |
#output hostname and timestamp in human readable formatSelect-Object Name,@{Name="Stamp"; Expression={[DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.lastLogonTimestamp)}}
-----------------------------------------------------------
get_stale_hosts_lastLogonTimestamp.ps1
# Gets time stamps for all computers in the domain that have NOT logged in since after specified date
$time=Read-host "Enter a date in format mm/dd/yyyy"
# Get all AD computers
Get-ADComputer -Filter * |
# Make sure to get the lastLogonTimestamp property
Get-ADObject -Properties lastlogontimestamp |
# lastLogonTimestamp - date specified is less than zero, outputs it to a CSV file is working directory
where {(([DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.lastlogontimestamp) - ([system.datetime]$time)).totaldays) -lt 0 } |
# Output hostname and lastLogonTimestamp into CSV
select-object Name,@{Name="Stamp"; Expression={[DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.lastLogonTimestamp)}} | export-csv .\all_old_computers_timestamps.csv
These are two scripts that I use pretty often when I'm trying to determine if I should disable/delete computer accounts in AD. Hope if helps someone else.
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by Matt Vogt
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter Update 1 Released
Today, Dell released Update 1 to the 1.0.1 version of their Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter. The biggest highlight among the fixes and changes would be the added support of ESX5 (vCenter 5). If you're currently running the 1.0.1 plugin under a vCenter 5 environment (which 'works', just not in a supported kind of way), you'll need to unregister and re-register the Dell Management Plugin after upgrading (see the Release Notes for all issues/resolutions).
One of the major changes from the original 1.0 to the 1.0.1 plug-in was the promise that updates to the appliance/software would come as an RPM patch and not tied to re-deploying another OVF. I'm glad to report that this worked wonderfully. You can find full instructions in the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter User Guide (page 41), but here's the quick and dirty:
- Always backup your appliance. Always backup pre-upgrade. When? Always.
- Open up and log into the web admin portal (https://myApplianceHostname/)
- Click on 'Appliance Management' in the left menu
- Click 'Upgrade'
- This will boot you out of the portal, upgrade the software and reboot the VM (the User Guide makes no mention that it reboots the VM, so just know that it does).
- I recommend opening up a VM Console so you don't have to just sit and refresh the page to see if it's back up or not - Restart your vCenter Client (this might just be me because I was having some DNS issues at the time on my desktop)
Happy upgrading.
Posted
by Matt Vogt
