Automation Archives - Page 3 of 4

Category: Automation

Powershell – Provision NetApp Volume as NFS Datastore to vCenter

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Jon

For anyone that’s ever been through the process of provisioning a new datastore to multiple ESX hosts, you know it can take some time. Below are the steps I use

Create Volume on NetApp
Set Security Style to Unix
Enable Storage Efficiency
Set NFS Export permissions to allow Read/Write + Root Permissions to all applicable hosts
Mount datastores on ESXi hosts

For a handful of hosts this is fine, but adding it to anything more than 4-5 hosts is reaaally painful in my experience. Below is a script you can use to take care of these steps in one swipe.

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NetApp: Get Statistics from Multiple Filers With One Command

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Jon

Does anyone actually find NetApp OnCommand System Commander to be fast enough for normal operation? I’ll admit, I still create a good amount of Volumes and LUNs using it, but it leaves a lot to be desired in the performance category. If you follow my blog at all, you know that I’m in the middle of a migration from a non-ha exchange environment to a DAG. Being the sensible admin that I am, I have multiple copies of my Exchange databases on different storage arrays, controlled by different NetApp filers. Using System Manager to monitor the space usage of the Volumes hosting my mailbox databases is way to slow for my comfort.

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Exchange 2010 – Bulk Mailbox Migration In Batches

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Jon

Update:
I created a new version of this script here
I recently completed a project that involved migrating Exchange 2010 Mailbox role from a standalone server to a Database Availability Group, or DAG. This was a large project that took a lot of time and planning, and had the potential to be very tedious. Fortunately, with a little knowhow, you can automate many of the tedious tasks.

I wanted to be in full control of mailbox migration, so my requirements were fairly strict:

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Use PowerShell to get Service Auto-Start Status Along with Human Readable Service Name

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Jon

This falls into the “Come on Microsoft” category.

I have been writing a script that will gather a bunch of information from servers, and returns an object with the information. Part of what I’m gathering is the servers that are set to auto start, and have their corresponding service stopped.

While you can get a list of services that meet part of this criteria like this:

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Register VMware Workspace as a Cloud Storage Provider in Office 2013

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Jon

I was lucky enough to spend the previous week in New Orleans, LA at Microsoft TechEd. I had a great time checking out the latest and greatest that our Redmond buddies are about to throw our way or has already tossed.

I spent the majority of my time focusing on Sharepoint 2013 and Exchange 2013, but I was able to spend some time focusing on the client side of things as well. One thing in particular that stood out to me in this area is how Microsoft is putting a lot of time and development into making their clients “Cloud Friendly”. Office 2013 is the first version that fully supports cloud storage providers.

Microsoft has graciously ~~strategically~~ provided us with built in compatibility with Skydrive. While this makes things easy to get things up and running, it makes any IT Admin experience a combination of nausea, anger, and anxiety. If you’re fortunate enough to have a sponsored, approved, supported cloud storage solution, you’ll undoubtedly want to use it.

I’ll show you how to accomplish just that in this post.

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Use PowerShell to Update Specific AD User’s Description Field with Last Login Time

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Jon

I encountered a challenge today that was fun to fix. There’s an Organizational Unit in my AD setup that has historically been used to store disabled AD objects instead of deleting them.

When an employee leaves the organization, our standard procedure is as followed:

Disable User Object
Move to separate OU (IE AD://internal.msd/disabled/users)
Update Description field with something like: Disabled by [username] on [date]
Retain user object for x amount of days, then tombstone it.

Best laid plans of mice and men… yada yada…

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Monitor NetApp SnapMirror via Solarwinds Server and Application Monitor

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Jon

So yesterday I talked about using a Powershell script with in Solarwinds to monitor volume sizes. Using the NetApp Data ONTAP Toolkit, we have the ability to do monitor a lot of different things, and track the information using Solarwinds. In this post I will show how to monitor SnapMirror relationships using Solarwinds.

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Monitor NetApp SAN via Solarwinds Server and Application Monitor

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Jon

I was unable to find any examples for how to do this online, so I came up with my own solution using the NetApp Data ONTAP toolkit as well as a slight modification of your powershell profile.

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