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Tales from real IT system administrators world and non-production environment

Stuffs from real IT system ADMINISTRATORS world and my LAB

VMware ESXi Unattended Setup: Building a Kickstart-Enabled Custom ISO from Scratch

Why Build a Custom ESXi Kickstart ISO?

Automating ESXi installations eliminates manual configuration errors and accelerates data center scaling. By embedding a Kickstart (KS.CFG) file into your ISO, you achieve:

  • Zero-touch deployments: Install ESXi with preconfigured network settings, passwords, and disk partitioning.

  • Consistency: Enforce identical configurations across hosts…

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How to Upgrade VMware vCenter Server Using Lifecycle Manager (vLCM)

Upgrading your VMware vCenter Server is a crucial part of maintaining a secure and efficient virtualization environment. In this guide, we’ll walk through the process of upgrading a vCenter Server using VMware Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), highlighting each key step with screenshots and best practices.

🔍 Step 1: Verify Current Build Number

First, log in to the vSphere Client and navigate to…

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From Manual to Automated - Managing Dell iDRAC Power via Redfish API and PowerShell

Managing server power states manually is time-consuming, especially in large-scale environments or remote setups. For IT administrators overseeing Dell PowerEdge servers, automation is key to efficiency. Enter iDRAC (Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller) and the Redfish API—a modern RESTful standard for systems management.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to automate server power managem…

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Advanced VMware Virtual Machine Disk Mapping HTML Reporting with PowerCLI

While managing large Broadcom VMware environments, understanding how multiple Virtual Machines virtual disks are mapped across datastores, SCSI controllers, and guest partitions is critical for performance tuning, troubleshooting, and capacity planning. Doing this manually is time-consuming and error-prone—especially when you're dealing with multiple VMs and complex storage configurations.

T…

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GitHub Actions for executing remote SSH commands on Microsoft Windows

The provided code snippets demonstrate a robust CI/CD pipeline for deploying notepad++ using Ansible and GitHub Actions. This setup enables automated deployment of software applications on a Windows virtual machine (VM).

Key Components
Ansible Playbook: The playbook defines tasks for deploying Notepad++ on a Windows VM. It uses the win_shell module to execute PowerShell commands, which map a n…

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Configuring Ansible to Manage Windows Servers via OpenSSH

In this article, we will explore how to configure Ansible to manage Windows servers using OpenSSH. This approach is particularly useful when WinRM is blocked or not feasible due to organizational policies.
Prerequisites

  • OpenSSH server installed and configured on the Windows machine
  • Ansible installed on the control node
  • Key-based authentication set up for passwordless login (optional but…

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Key based passwordless authentication to Microsoft Windows OpenSSH Server

This is a second part of  OpenSSH Server configuration for Windows. In this part I am generating private and public keys, which will be used to login into Windows OpenSSH server. When using key based authentication on OpenSSH, you don't need to provide a password to connect Windows Server over OpenSSH (This is for Linux SSH server as well).

To start configuring password less OpenSSH server o…

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OpenSSH Server configuration for Windows

I had a requirement to test configuring OpenSSH server on Microsoft Windows and connect it through OpenSSH client. Using given below steps in this article we can setup OpenSSH server on Windows server and connect through Linux SSH client.

First go to Settings >> Apps & features >> Optional features >> Add a feature >> Search openssh >> Select checkbox on OpenSSH Server >> and Click Install bu…

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Get Nutanix virtual machine details using PowerShell

This article is demonstration on how to connect to Nutanix using PowerShell and fetch virtual machine inventory. This is the view of Nutanix prism central portal and on the dashboard I can see all the information related to Nutanix objects.

nutanix AHV powershell automation configuration inventory aos hypervisor virtualization.png

In this prism central I can see virtual machines. My task was to fetch this inventory information details using PowerShell.

Nutanix prism central ahv hypervisor aos virtualization virtualmachine powershell guest tool console migrate snapshot automation inventory configuration.png

Below is the PowerShe…

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Deploying Azure ARM templates with Terraform and terraform templatefile example

This article is a revised article of Create CPU quota usage alerts for subscription using Azure ARM templates. Initially, I encountered a challenge while attempting to incorporate ARM variables or parameters into Kusto Query Language (KQL) within an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template. Despite the rest of the template functioning as expected, the hard-coded KQL value used for defining alerts p…

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You code doesn't seem to work on Windows 11. I am seeing an error message

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Hello, my friend,

I just wanted to say thank you very much for the excellent instruction guide!

It's my first time using Packer and I had no problem creating a new Windows 2022 VM using the information here, after tweaking the scripts.

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