Recently I’ve been tasked with setting up VxRail monitoring for a Dell EMC VxRail Appliance. Even though I’ve succeeded setting this up, it was has not been a smooth sail. Therefore, I’ve written this blog to help you setup monitoring for VxRail. Setup VxRail monitoring (EMC does not want you to) Since VxRail is initially setup by the vendor I had to get acquainted with the product first. The first thing you should probably do after taking a product into management is setup monitoring.

PowerCLI last patch date You might find yourself wanting a report of when your vSphere servers have been patched for the last time. Here you will find a simple PowerCLI script that uses vSphere CLI to query the last VIB install date. PowerCLI script: Get-VMHost | ForEach-Object -Process { [PSCustomObject]@{ 'lastpatchdate' = [datetime]((Get-ESXCli -VMHost $_).software.vib.list() | Select-Object -Property installdate -ExpandProperty installdate | Sort-Object -Descending)[0] 'host' = $_.Name 'version' = $_.version 'build' = $_.

Below is a PowerCLI one-liner you can use to validate if all your root passwords are what you expect them to be. get-vmhost | %{ $null = connect-viserver $_.name ` -user root -password "MyFakePassword" -EA 0 if (-not ($?)) { write-warning "Password failed for $($_.name)" } else { Disconnect-VIServer $_.name -force -confirm:$false } } Reset a known password over PowerCLI Below is a short code snippet to help you change your root password on ESXi hosts.