PowerCLI - 6

VMwareScripting.com is a VMware Scripting Forum and has been up for only a few weeks. It's already filled with a lot of useful information. The man behind VMwareScripting.com  is Eric Sarakaitis, he works for American Electric Power as a systems administrator, where he has a pretty large VMware deployment.

He has recently started using the VI toolkit with a few of his co-workers. Having trouble finding what he was looking for in the VMware forums, he decided to start his own collection and offer it up free to the public.

This afternoon, I was jammed in traffic again. Luckily I burned the MP3 of the PowerScripting Podcast with Carter Shanklin on a CD and listened to the broadcast in my car. At one point Carter was referring to a new verbose logging option which enables you to intercept the soap traffic between you VI-Client and the vCenter server. This gives you the opportunity to find out how to call the really advanced stuff from PowerShell. Carter used it to fix a bug in a resize command-let. When I finally got home, I had to find out the command options and was staring at one of the most beautiful log files I ever saw, it’s brilliant.

Just start your VI-Client with the following options and you will receive massive output.

VpxClient.exe -log +sd

You can find the log files here: C:\Users\Eric Sloof\AppData\Local\VMware\vpx vi-client.txt

PowerShellPlus v2.1 Beta is live and publicly available! here's the exciting information about an early look at what the PowerShellPlus team has been working on. PowerShellPlus version 2.1 introduces several new and cool features focused on reducing the PowerShell learning curve, increasing the productivity of PowerShell development and exercising the capabilities of PowerShell 2.0. The new features include:

• Code sharing – Enables you to leverage the wealth of scripts that reside in the PowerShell.com and PoshCode.org libraries. Increase your productivity by quickly and easily searching and grabbing the scripts from those libraries. You can also submit your own scripts to the PowerShell.com library directly from PowerShell Plus Editor
• Visual Basic support – The PowerShell Plus Editor can now edit and run Visual Basic scripts
• STA mode support – Enables you to produce pretty cool looking GUI’s with Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) using PowerShell 2.0.
• PowerShell Assembly Detection – Gives the Learning Center an auto-upgrade path if PowerShell v2 CTP3 is detected and then displays the most up-to-date information
• Learning Center Auto-Load - Makes searching for a request with a single match much easier to use since the topic will load automatically, saving extra keystrokes
• Cmdlet parameter position – Shows you additional information in the code completion popup window about parameters including position and type
• Console size overlay – Shows you the height and width of the Console when you resize it
• Additional Sample Scripts - Active Directory, IIS 7.0 and MySQL
• PowerShell v2 CTP3 Support – Including Block Comments and the $Profile variable  

Last week I had a genuine bloggers-lunch at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration with Matthijs Haverink, blogger at Virtualfuture and Rob Mokkink, the author of the HBA load balance script. We talked about various topics and I told them why I created the Resource Pool Calculator and how important it can be in large organizations, where virtual machines are deployed rapidly. Driven by my enthusiasm Rob completely rewrote my calculator script and added some real cool functions like logging to it.

This Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator recalculates all your resource pools. Depending on the number of virtual machines per resource pool, the number of reservations for memory and CPU is automatically lifted after running the Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator. The script also respects the existing individual virtual machine reservations and adds those value’s to the total RP sum.

You can get your copy here.

Carter's team created some really cool VI Toolkit 1.5 video's.

Managing Storage with VI Toolkit 1.5
Some important fixes in VI Toolkit 1.5
Get-Stat Improvements in VI Toolkit 1.5
Resizing Guest Disks with Invoke-VMScript
HA and DRS in VI Toolkit 1.5

Carter Chanklin, Product Manager at VMware's End User Enablement, released a new version of the VI toolkit. The VI Toolkit 1.5 team has added 32 new cmdlets, enhanced the existing cmdlets, and fixed tons of bugs. If you’re the sort of person who loves fine print, you can also have a look at their release notes. The release notes has a great table that shows all the differences between 1.0 and 1.5.

The VI Toolkit 1.5 team

Wil is a software developer who has a passion for Open Source and VMware. The VI-Toolkit.com wiki can be used as a location to store scripts and snippets of source code for managing VMware hosts and their virtual machines. This new site will contain information for developers and administrators about extending and managing their VMware virtual environments. This includes everything from automation on virtual machines in VMware player up to managing your Virtual Infrastructure using the available Software Development Kits from VMware.  The focus is trying to provide examples about the source code. Over time this will hopefully include a repository of scripts and helpful snippets of code for all of you. There are currently 389 pages stored in the wiki database. Almost all of the pages are categorized, so using the categories landing page to navigate is a good way to quickly see what is currently available for you.

I discovered a great weblog called Get-Admin, it was started by Glenn Sizemore, who asked Andrew Sullivan to join a few weeks afterward.  Since then they have focused on IT operations, administration and automation, with a more specific focus on virtualization in the enterprise.  They occasionally post other topics (databases, POSH related to non-virtualization tasks), but they are both passionate about virtualization and automation of administration tasks.

Andrew Sullivan works for a very large IT contracting company as a virtualization administrator.  He has a Linux and Solaris background, consequentially he tends to focus on managing the ESX hosts directly by leveraging the VI Perl Toolkit to accomplish automation tasks.  Previously he has been a PHP developer for enterprise web applications.

Glenn Sizemore works for the same company.  He is a very talented Windows administrator with a networking background.  His primary interest is PowerShell and evangelism of its benefits, but the focus of many of his posts is on how PowerShell can help to quickly and effectively automate VI administration.

http://get-admin.com/blog/

After the latest release of PowerGui’s VMware PowerPack, the VI Toolkit adoption seems to be skyrocketing. Dmitry Sotnikov opened up a new Virtualization discussions forum which will be hosted by Scott Herold, Quest’s Lead Architect of Virtualization Solutions. Scott is also bringing vmguru.com back to life and posted the article Getting Started with PowerShell and PowerGUI in your Virtual Infrastructure. You’ll find a quick 5-10 minute primer to get started with PowerGUI and PowerShell in a VMware Infrastructure.

Windows PowerShell V2 CTP3 introduces several significant features to Windows PowerShell 1.0 and Windows PowerShell V2 CTPs that extends its use, improves its usability, and allows you to control and manage the Windows environment more easily and comprehensively.

Selected New and Updated Features in Windows PowerShell V2 CTP3

PowerShell Remoting

Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)

63 New Cmdlets

Modules

Script Debugging

Advanced Functions

PowerShell Class API