Powershell on Evan Hoffman

Use PowerShell to disconnect the CDROMs from all VMs in vCenter

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:59:36 +0000

Recently I was moving all VMs from one NFS datastore to another so we could destroy the old volume. Storage vMotion took care of this for the most part, but even after moving the files, vCenter still showed that the VMs were using the old datastore. It turned out this was due to the VMs having mounted ISOs on that datastore. The solution was to eject/unmount the CDrom, but I didn’t want to do “Edit Settings…” and manually remove the CDrom for 200+ VMs.

Exchange 2010 Post-Upgrade weirdness: can't edit Mail Non-Universal Group or Security Group

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 22:29:38 +0000

Now that everyone’s been moved to Exchange 2010 we’ve started using the 2010 Exchange Managment Console/Shell exclusively which has revealed some weirdness. First, we created a new group in AD using an old script (which used LDAP) and created a Mail-enabled Global Security group. We put people in the group, and everything seemed to be working fine until it was discovered that users in the group couldn’t see the group in the Global Address List. Users not in the group had no problem seeing the group. Additionally, users in the group couldn’t see users added directly in 2010. This only appeared to affect the GAL; the users were able to send/receive email fine with the full SMTP addresses.

Exchange 2010 Post-Upgrade weirdness: can't edit Mail Non-Universal Group or Security Group

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 22:29:38 +0000

Changing all Exchange mailboxes to use database defaults for quota limits with PowerShell

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 16:38:03 +0000

Here’s an example of why I’ve come to love PowerShell. Under Exchange 2003, we set users’ mailbox quota limits per-user, since we initially set them ridiculously high (around 20 GB). The reason we did that was that prior to this year we actually didn’t have any quotas on user mailboxes and the average mailbox was about 9 GB. In preparation for moving Exchange to the datacenter (over our measly 5Mbps upload line) we introduced quotas and over the course of about 2 months gradually lowered the limits as people whittled away their old email until they were under the quota we had established (about 2.25 GB for the no-send limit – I forgot the rationale for that number – and 1.75 GB for the warning limit [the no-receive limit was set to about 40GB since I never wanted users to hit that limit]).