Welcome to Jonathan Colón’s blog 👋

Cyber-Security Researcher, Developer and Infrastructure expert having interests in Automation, DevOps, Networking, Multi-OS based Systems, Python, Golang, Powershell and passionate for Open Source contribution; loves Command Line, FOSS. Mojo: A bad day at the beach is better than any good day at work!

HomeLab: Veeam VBR Documentation with AsBuiltReport

Hello everyone! I took on the task of developing yet another report, yes yet another one 🤣 and it is related to the documentation of Veeam Backup & Replication implementations in specific for version 12+ onwards. This report is based on the AsBuildReport framework which is a project created by Tim Carman . The source code of the report can be found in Github here I leave the link so you can see the scope of the project....

February 20, 2024 · 9 min · Jon Colon

VMware: How to create a Linux VDI Images for Horizon 8 2303

This time I am going to talk about how to use HashiCorp packer to create a VM master image that can be used as a template to publish a Pool in VMware Horizon. Although there are many HowTo’s on how to automatically create a template with packer, all the ones I have seen are oriented to Windows 10/11 and not for Linux. It is for this reason, that I gave myself the task of creating this post....

April 11, 2023 · 8 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano

Security: Auditing Active Directory Database with NtdsAudit

This time I am going to talk about a method to perform audits of the contents of the Active Directory database (NTDS.dit). The tool called NtdsAudit was created by Dionach, here I leave the link so you can see the functionality of the application: https://github.com/dionach/NtdsAudit As explained on the tool’s web page NtdsAudit is an application that helps to audit Active Directory databases. It provides some useful statistics related to accounts and passwords....

February 20, 2023 · 7 min · Jonathan Colon Feliciano

HomeLab: Veeam Diagrammer installation and setup

Hello everyone, This time I’ll be talking a bit about a project I’ve been working on for the last few months that has the use of creating basic diagrams of the components of the Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure. The tool is called Veeam.Diagrammer and you can see the project page on Github. Here is the link so you can see the features of this tool. https://github.com/rebelinux/Veeam.Diagrammer Moreover, this project is still under continuous development, so you may encounter errors or bugs 😁....

December 22, 2022 · 5 min · Jon Colon

Govc: vSphere CLI built on top of govmomi, an introduction

Hello everyone, This time I will be talking about how to use Govc, a CLI alternative developed in the GO programming language, this CLI is designed to be an easy to use alternative to the Web GUI and very suitable for automation tasks. This tool is based on govmomi, which is a library for GO used to interact with the VMware vSphere Application Programming Interface (API). Note: vSphere versions that have reached end of support may work, but are not officially supported....

August 12, 2022 · 2 min · Jon Colon

HowTo: vSphere Diagnostic Tool

This time I am going to show you how to use the vSphere Diagnostic Tool, this tool is used to perform diagnostic checks on the VMware vCenter Server Appliance. This tool consists of a python script that executes diagnostic commands to validate the health status of the vCenter service. Note: As a minimum requirement it is required to have a version of vCenter Server 6.5 or higher. This tool performs the following validations:...

June 2, 2022 · 7 min · Jon Colon

PowerShell: VMware PowerCLI get Datastore Information

Hello, In this post I will show you how to get the datastore list in a vSphere infrastructure using PowerCLI. Now, first of all we have to establish connection to our vCenter/ESXi to get this information. We can do this using the “Connect-VIServer” command. PS C:\Users\jocolon> Connect-VIServer -Server 192.168.5.2 Specify Credential Please specify server credential User: administrator@vsphere.local Password for user administrator@vsphere.local: ******** Name Port User ---- ---- ---- 192.168.5.2 443 VSPHERE....

December 18, 2021 · 2 min · Jon Colon

HomeLab: vSphere documentation with vDocumentation

This time I will be showing a tool that I use regularly to quickly identify inventory information in a vsphere infrastructure. This tool is called “vDocumentation” and precisely uses PowerCLI to obtain the inventory information. The creator of this tool “Ariel Sanchez Mora” @arielsanchezmor defines vDocumentation as: vDocumentation provides a community-created set of PowerCLI scripts that produce infrastructure documentation of vSphere environments in CSV or Excel file format. Ariel Sánchez Mora Github page However, to get started, the following requirements must be met:...

December 16, 2021 · 6 min · Jon Colon

HomeLab: VMware SRM Documentation with AsBuiltReport

Hello everyone! These last weeks I have been working on improving my coding skills taking into account that now the trend is “Software Defined Everything”. This time I have been spending time on PowerShell creating several reports through the AsBuildReport project created by “Tim Carman” @tpcarman Link Here . The report I helped finish this time is related to documenting VMware Site Recovery Manager installations. The report was initially created by “Matt Allford” @mattallford and I took on the task of trying to finish the work that had already been started....

November 25, 2021 · 13 min · Jon Colon

PowerShell: VMware PowerCLI initial vCenter Connection

Hi all, In a previous post PowerShell: VMware PowerCLI Introduction I showed you how to install VMware PowerCLI and a basic introduction of the purpose of this management tool. In this post I will show you how to do the initial connection to the vCenter using the PowerCLI tool. It is important to mention that PowerCLI can be used to connect to both vCenter and vSphere “ESXi” server independently but in this post I will be showing examples only referring to the vCenter server....

November 10, 2021 · 4 min · Jon Colon