Selecting and removing old snapshots

Me: "Say Customer X, I see you still have some snapshots here and there. Can I remove them? It's not wise to keep them for a long time."
Customer X: "Oh yeah, I forgot about those. Well: those updates we did worked out fine, so anything from before 11-07-2016 can be deleted"

Get-VM | Get-Snapshot | Where {$_.Created -lt (Get-Date 11-07-2016) | Remove-Snapshot -confirm:$false

Me: "OK, done!"

Another possibility: "Can you give me a list of snapshots that are older than a week?"

Get-VM | Get-Snapshot | Where {$_.Created -lt ((Get-Date).AddDays(-7))} | Select VM, Name

Did I say how much I love Powershell/PowerCLI? ;-)

Get the serialnumber via Powershell

I quickly wanted to know a serial number for a certain HP Server, but didn't want to log on to the ILO card to get it from there. You don't have to, either:

gwmi win32_bios | fl SerialNumber

Works on most machines I've seen so far (HP and Dell).

Decode AsSecureString into cleartext

I needed a way to enter a password from the console. This is done by typing:

$pwd = Read-Host

It works, but I didn't want this text to be visible on the screen while I'm typing it:

$pwd = Read-Host -AsSecureString

Success! Now let's see the password in action:

PS C:\Users\Akos> $pwd

System.Security.SecureString

.. Hmm, not quite what I had hoped for. But there is hope yet:

$cleartextpwd = [Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringAuto([Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($pwd))

Decodes the secure string into cleartext! Now you can type a password securely and use it. Be sure to remove the variable once you're done ;-)