We often add and remove machines from a manual Desktop Pool on our Horizon server. Registering the machine is done with an install script. When we're done with a machine we want to un-register it from the server. The only way we have found to do this is to log into the web portal and manually delete each one. This is cumbersome and time-consuming when we have large numbers of machines to un-register.
The machines that will need to be un-registered will have similar names. Is there a way to automate this with PowerCLI?
Of course you can,
$VM = Get-VM -Name nameOfVM
Remove-VM $VM
Full example you can find here
Not sure if you had this question answered already, but there are a couple of ways that you can do this, depending on the version of PowerCLI that you have installed. The easiest way right now is to get the latest version of PowerCLI and make sure that you install the View module along with it. From here, peruse through the View API (https://code.vmware.com/web/dp/explorer-apis?id=58)
VMware also has a helper PSM1 script in their Example gallery, which is available via github: https://github.com/vmware/PowerCLI-Example-Scripts/tree/master/Modules/VMware.Hv.Helper
Related
The Sitecore documentation provides some pretty clear instructions on how to configure a Sitecore instance as a processing server:
https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/xdb_configuration/configure_a_processing_server
However, many of those steps require enabling/disabling of files manually on the installed server. Has anybody seen or built a patch file (similar to SwitchMasterToWeb) that can disable/enable the appropriate functionality as a patch? I would rather not touch the default Sitecore install and instead rely on automated deployment of configuration patches.
I haven't seen this as a patch and not sure if its possible to do this with just one patch (would love to be proved wrong), but for something like this I've used a Powershell script.
I set up Octopus Deploy to run a Powershell script step after deploy to disable files and change settings if patch files can't do the job.
I can highly recommend the Powercore tools for this kind of thing.
https://github.com/adoprog/Sitecore-PowerCore/tree/master/Framework/ConfigUtils
If anybody else winds up looking for this, I've posted some work up on GitHub for patch files for a variety of versions for 8.0:
https://github.com/jst-cyr/Sitecore-Role-Configs
The patches there will do the 'disable/enable/change' for authoring, delivery, or processing. I don't have one for the reporting server.
Sitecore has evaluated POC for same. At this point of time applciable for Sitecore CMS 8.1 rev. 160302 (Update-2). See here-
https://github.com/Sitecore/Sitecore-Configuration-Roles
I'm working on a project where I think of distributing tasks to VMs that are dynamically managed (created, destroyed, paused, run processes from host, etc). I was wondering what would be a good approach or API to accomplish the management of the VMs. Below are some examples of what I'm thinking but I wanted to get some guidance on the best approach.
Vagrant-binding: it looked perfect but it out of date and not supported.
Oracle Tools: the vagrant module looks interesting but there isn't much documentation and I'm a bit confused on how to actually use it.
VirtualBox sdk: I'm a bit confused on the setup of this.
As you can see from the examples I was thinking in Java but I'm open to working on other languages. This project academic in nature and I'm a student so I know that this might not be the most practical thing to do but I wanted to see if it possible and what would be best way to accomplish it.
I have recently created a program to manage the VMs at my work. I used object-pascal (Delphi) to create the GUI and then did all the heavy lifting using vboxmanage commands that are ran as a process through cmd but called from my program. Oracle has a nice list of available commands here
For example
List running Vms
VBoxManage.exe list runningvms
Import a VM
VBoxManage.exe import (VM_To_Import_Location) --vsys 0 --vmname (Name_of_VM) --unit 11 --disk (Where_You_Want_VM_Stored)
Start a VM
VBoxManage.exe startvm (Name_Of_VM) --type headless
Take a Snapshot
VBoxManage.exe snapshot (VM_Name) take (Snapshot_Name) -desc "My Snapshot Description"
Restore a Snapshot
Vboxmanage.exe snapshot (VM_Name) restore (Snapshot_Name)
There are many more for pretty much everything you would want to do with a VM.
I am working with a client that demands multi-stage server setup: development server, stage server and production/live server.
Stage should be as stable as it can be to test all those new features we develop at the development server and take this to the live server in the end.
We use git and github for version controlling. I use Ubuntu server edition as the OS.
The problem is, I have never working in such multi-stage server plan. What software/projects would you recommend to do a proper way of handling such setup, especially deployment and moving a new feature developed to the stage and then to the live server ?
We use two different methods of moving code from environment to environment. The first is to use branches and triggers with our source control system (mercurial in our case, though you can do the same thing with git). The other, is to use fabric, a python library for executing shell code across a number of servers.
Using source control, you can have several main branches, like production development staging. Say you want to move a new feature into staging. I'll explain in terms of mercurial, but you can port the commands over to git and it should be fine.
hg update staging
hg merge my-new-feature
hg commit -m 'my-new-feature > staging'
hg push
You then have your remote source control server push to all of your web servers using a trigger. A trigger on each web server will then do an update and reload the web server.
To move from staging to production, it's just as easy.
hg update production
hg merge staging
hg commit -m 'staging > production'
hg push
It's not the nicest method of deployment, and it makes rolling back quite hard. But it's quick and easy to set up, and still a lot better than manually deploying each change to each server.
I won't go through fabric, as it can get quite involved. You should read their documentation so you understand what it is capable of. There are plenty of tutorials around for fabric and django. I highly recommend the fabric route as it gives you lots more control, and only involves writing some python.
There is a nice branching model for git (as it is also used by github itself for example). You can easily apply this branching model using git-flow, which is a git extension that enables you to apply some high level repository operations that fit into this model. There's also a nice blogpost about this.
I do not know what exactly you want to automize in your deployment workflow, but if you apply the model mentioned above, most of the correct version handling is done by git.
To add some further automatic processing to this, fabric is a simple but great tool, and you will find many tutorials about its usage (also in combination with git).
For handling python dependencies using virtualenv and pip is for sure a very good way to go.
If you need something more complex,eg. to handle more than one django instance on one machine and for handling system wide dependencies etc checkout puppet or chef.
Try Gondor.io or Ep.io, they both make it pretty easy (gondor especially excels in this area) to have two+ instances with very similar code, from your VCS -- and to move data back and forth. (if you need an invite, ask either in IRC, but if I recall, they're both open now)
Would it be possible/safe to run two instances of VisualSVNServer pointing to the same repo?
I've searched around and not had any luck finding anything related specifically to this question. The only reason I ask is because we have a need to enable Windows Authentication/Integration over http, and svn authentication over https. It does not seem to be an option to run both within a single instance of VisualSVNServer.
If not, do you know of alternative solution that would allow for this?
Edit: Received the following answer from VisualSVN Support
Thanks to Subversion design, repositories are ready to be accessed by several server instances simultaneously. We haven't experimented a lot with such configuration, but I think it's possible.
Am I understand properly, that you are going to store your repositories on a network storage and run two VisualSVN Server instances on different machines?
Please take care about the server.pid. file. In the current release, this file is stored in the repositories folder. So there will be a collision between two instances of VisualSVN Server. We are going to fix this problem in the upcoming release.
You can easily relocate the server.pid to another destination by adding the following command to the "C:\Program Files\VisualSVN Server\conf\httpd-custom.conf" file:
[[
PidFile "C:/Tmp/server.pid"
]]"
You can point two VisualSVN Server instances to the same repository if it stored on SMB share without any problems. It's typical configuration for active/active or active/passive cluster setups.
I wouldn't do this because as far as I know, VisualSVN brings its own web server (Apache) and SVN binaries. I would expect locking issues when running two of each on the same repo, if it's possible at all. VisualSVN probably won't install twice at all.
This sounds like a case for separate installation of SVN and Apache and custom configuration. I can't say whether what you want is possible but I would expect it is. It's probably to be fiddly, though - VisualSVN takes away a lot of configuration hassle that you have when doing the setup manually. Questions about that would be appropriate to ask on Serverfault.com.
Apart from VisualSVN, there also are other, also commercial wrappers. Maybe one of them is more flexible in this respect.
Update: Also, check this out: Supporting Multiple Repository Access Methods from the SVN book
We recently bought a new rack and set of servers for it, we want to be able to redeploy these boxes as build servers, QA regression test servers, lab re-correlation servers, simulation servers, etc.
We have played a bit with VMWare, VirtualPC, VirtualBox etc, creating a virtual build server, but we came across a lot of issues when we tried to copy it for others to use, having to reconfigure every new copy of the VM.
We are using Windows XP x86/x64 and Windows Vista x86/x64, so I had to rename the machine, join the domain etc for every new copy.
Ideally we just want to be able to add a new box, deploy a thin boot strap OS (Linux is fine here) to get the VM up an running, then use it.
One other thing we have limited to no budget, so free is best.
I would like to understand others experiences in doing the same thing.
FYI, I am not in systems IT, this we are group of software engineers trying to set this up.
Any links to good tutorials would be great.
The problem you're running into is the machine SID must be unique for each machine in a domain. Of course by copying an image you now break that unique constraint.
I'd suggest that you read the documentation for Sysprep in the reskit and Vista System Image Manager - your friends for XP/Win2k3 and Vista/Win2k8 respectively.
These tools enable to "reseal" your configured instance of the OS such that the next time it boots - it can prompt for information such as network configuration, machine names, admin user ID's, run scripts etc.
Also be aware that the licencing restrictions for Windows desktop clients are generally per image - not per server.
Using these tools with HyperV we created complete preconfigured instances of Win2k3 & Win2k8 that boot to finish installing Sharepoint - going further we used the diffing disks to overlay Visual Studio so our devs could use the production images for their work. It has radically changed our development process.
At this point our entire public website is run on HyperV with of 5 boxes running 15 images for a mix of soft and hard redundancy - they take several hundred million page views per week.
Another option for dealing with the SID probelm is NewSID. This is a simpler tool than sysprep, in that all it does is rename the machine and reassign the SID; if you don't need all the other features of sysprep this is a much easier tool to use.