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Using Ansible to Update ESXI VIB’s and manage vCenter at scale.

Recently I’ve been using Ansible to push out updates to vSphere environments that have a lot of hosts, but no working installation of VMWare Update Manager available. During the creation of the below playbook, I found a few interesting caveats to using Ansible to manage your ESXI hosts and vCenter. To resolve this, I’ve created a playbook that does the following:

  • Puts targeted hosts in mainteance mode and evacuates VM’s
  • Copies VIB to the host
  • Checks for existing installation of VIB, Uninstall if found
  • Installs VIB
  • Takes host out of maintenance mode.

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Open Source your Patio Lighting

I’m a massive fan of using Home Assistant for running all aspects of my “smart home” automation routines. This weekend I decided to put up some spare RGB light strips around my patio. In the span of about 1 hour, I’ve got a LED Strip solution that is entirely controlled by open source software, run locally by me (no cloud required), and is very customizable. I’m using the following parts —

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Using Azure Runbooks to automate scale set operations with Powershell jobs

Azure Powershell runbooks are cool. I’ve been exploring using them as a way to avoid using a dedicated VM for running simple PowerShell Scripts in Azure. I have a group of instances that are running from a dedicated Scale Set that I need to reboot nightly. It’s pretty easy to get this going. You can import my PS1 runbook with the following cmdlet

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