Removing Modern Apps from Win10 Gold Image

You are creating a gold image. You are disconnected from the internet. You want to get rid of all the non-corporatte, interent grabbing apps on there.

I looked at this post https://gal.vin/2017/04/06/removing-uwp-apps-mdt/

And found some great tips. Look at the list of apps that can not be removed. You desperately want to, but don't be fooled.

I added an out-gridview command to mine.

Get-AppxPackage -allusers | out-gridView -Mode Multiple | remove-AppxPackage

It simplifies the whole script. Since you know the App name is valid, no error checking is needed.

Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Out-GridView -Mode Multiple | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online

And the same for the Provisioned Packages.

Remove snapshots on vCenter easily

If you have a bunch of snapshots all over your environment and you need to pick only a few to remove, here's an easy way.

I was looking through some posts and found this to get started. http://pipe2text.com/?page_id=251

I modified it a bit to get the items I needed.

We had an issue where the NetApp snap manager process failed and stayed in the event log at 44% or 59%. Rebooting the vCenter server worked, but we were left with smvi_ snapshots all over the place.

$snaps = get-vm svr-00* | get-snapshot | where {$_.descrption -like "*201804*" | select-object vm,name,description | out-gridview -mode multiple
foreach ($snap in $snaps) {
get-vm $snap.vm | get-snapshot $snap.name -RunAsync -verbose -confirm:$false
}

You can change the svr-00* to be a subset of your VMs or remove it to get all of them.
You can modify "*201804*" to filter for a particular description.

Gives you a nice list, you can sort by column, pick the ones you want and clean it up.

If you want to get fancy, you can change the items to variable,s get some input from the user and plop it into the code. But I'll let you get fancy, here is the quick and dirty to get you started.

installing ESX 5.5 on HP Gen9 with internal SD Card

So for those of you still on 5.5 and not taking the leap to 6.5 (which is great since you can simply upgrade your whole Windows vCenter server to the vCenter appliance in one swift motion), we are going to look at the issues of Gen9 servers with ESX 5.5

First of all the SD Card, the smallest you can get from HP right now is 8GB, that I'm sure will increase again in a week or two. But it's more than enough for ESX.

So when the installed finds your storage, you'll see HP ILO SD Card, that is it. It bothered me because it said ILO and the ILO itself has an embedded installer folder and a user data folder that can be enabled, but that is the one to pick.

UPDATE: for the Gen10 servers it is USB 3.0 CDW weird names it finds, but knowing is half the battle.