Zsoldier's Tech Blog

Summary: Was going through and attempting to setup new vSAN cluster but noticed that the wizard was only showing 3 of 4 disks from 3 of 4 hosts and 0 disks from another host.  This appears to be by design where the setup wizard will only target disks that have 0 partitions.  Makes sense. This, however, is not obvious in the setup. Solution: Simply delete any partitions from those disks that you'd like to have vSAN claim.  You can do this enmasse via PowerCLI or the Web Client interface (as pictured below). [ Warning: This is a destructive process so be sure that you know absolutely for certain that you are targeting the correct storage devices.  This is especially true if you plan to script this process.] Erase Partition in Web Client The above process would suck if you were doing it against a large cluster, so learn to do it in powershell or some other automated method. PowerCLI Method: $TCluster = Get-Cluster TargetClusterName $TVMHosts = $TCluste...

I've posted about OpBot in the past w/ a brief overview on how you can setup and deploy.  It's a very cool and immensely useful tool.  However, I must balance this with security.  Responsibly deployed, it can be a very useful tool.  However, there is a dark side to this from a security management perspective.  It also poses the very real risk for allowing generic internet access from within your datacenter. First off, OpBot from Opvizor makes it very clear that you should only grant it's integration account read-only access.  You can do 'destructive' PowerCLI commands by passing login info via slack, but also not recommended.  As much as they have created an immensely useful tool, it also is somewhat of a pandora's box.  It's brought to light a security hole that can be difficult to secure at scale.  Currently Opvizor is the only one that I know of that makes this type of appliance, but that doesn't stop the many possible clones of thi...