PowerCLI - 7

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Wow, the yellow ball really rocks, just try it out. It’s one of the coolest apps I’ve seen. Maybe even better then Veaam’s upcoming free monitor tool. ;-)

I’ll give you a short demo how easy it is to create a PowerShell user interface with the free PrimalForms from Sapien. At the 4th of November Sapien released their first public version of PrimalForms.

Just wanted to let you know that the download and updated information is available on the PowerGUI website at the following link.

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•  Reorganized the PowerPack structure to facilitate easier management of multiple hosts and to allow users to retrieve objects from one or more of the hosts they are managing whether they are already connected or not.
• Added support for browsing the VMware Inventory hierarchy (includes Hosts and Clusters, Virtual Machines and Templates, Networks and Datastores), including being able to browse directly into the file system on the datastores.
• Added many new links and actions.
• Exposed many more VMware Infrastructure objects through topological views and through integration in the hierarchy.
• Improved the performance of many nodes, links and actions.
• Added single sign-on support (note that connecting to multiple hosts using the same username but different passwords is currently not supported, but we are working on that and will provide support for this soon).
• Tested management against Virtual Center 2.0, ESX 3.0x and 3.5, ESXi 3.5 and Virtual Server 2.0 (note: management of Virtual Center 2.0 requires version 1.0 of the VMware VI Toolkit).
• And more!

Continue reading "PowerGUI’s VMware Powerpack available for download" »

Quest plans on launching a pretty significant update to our PowerGUI PowerPack for VMware.  There are four key features as a part of this update:

• Dynamic Nodes – This allow users to navigate their VMware PowerShell management as if they were using VirtualCenter.

• Support for a broader range of VMware VI Toolkit Cmdlets.

• Integration with the VMware SDK for advanced actions not yet supported by the VMware VI Toolkit.

• Support for the upcoming VMware VI Toolkit 1.5 release.

Hugo Peeters is is on the loose again ! :-) Read more at PeetersOnline.nl

Although I spend quite some time in the Powershell Command Line Interface, the main tool for managing the Virtual Infrastructure remains the VI Client. So wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow show the results of our Powershell VI Toolkit scripts inside the VI Client? Well, we can! Let’s take a closer look at Custom Fields / Custom Attributes. If you select either a VMHost (ESX Server) or a VM in the VI Client and open the Summary tab, you will see the Annotations section in the bottom left. When you click Edit, I’m sure you have used the Notes section to enter Descriptions. But have you ever used the Attributes section? Here you can manually add and remove custom attributes and their values. Go ahead and create one. Then select a cluster or datacenter and click the Hosts or Virtual Machines tab. You will notice you can display your custom attribute in this table view, just like all the other properties of your VMs / Hosts. Pretty sweet!

I’ve finally met Hugo after I delivered my VMUG presentation last Friday and he’s a really bright guy. I think with this script he created a real competitor for Richard’s VC-Plus.

Compellent has expanded its industry-leading storage management to multiply the time and money saving benefits across the enterprise with a Windows PowerShell–based command set. The Storage Center Command Set for Windows Powershell, streamlines system management, volume administration, Data Instant Replay™ management and advanced storage features using more than 60 new cmdlets. Via the PowerScripting Podcast.

Eric Siebert published another one of his famous top 10 lists. The most recent addition is the “Top 10 PowerShell scripts that VMware administrators should use” and my Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator is at the 3rd place. :-) This PowerShell script recalculates all of your resource pools and can automatically increase memory and CPU reservations. It can be run interactively using a GUI or through a command line with arguments. You’ll find Mike DePetrillo ‘s “Quick Migration” , a poor man’s VMotion at number one.

Hugo Peeters over at PeetersOnline.nl created a really cool PowerShell script which checks how much disk space you’re wasting inside your VM’s but also on your VMFS. I’m going to edit my PowerShell presentation (the one for next Friday) for the last :-) time and try to fit in a page with this script.

Using VMware seriously requires a lot of (shared) storage. This kind of storage (on a SAN for instance) is quite expensive. So you might want to check if you are wasting a lot of this space. When you look at the storage in VMware, it consists of multiple abstraction layers. A virtual machine has one or more Logical Disks, which are indicated by driveletters. You can use WMI to determine the amount of used and free space (Win32_LogicalDisk). One or more logical disks are contained in a partition. One or more partitions reside on a physical disk. That physical disk is really a virtual disk, a vmdk file to be precise. One or more vmdk files reside in a Datastore, which can be found on a LUN on your SAN.

Carter Chanklin, Product Manager at VMware's End User Enablement, recently released a new version of the VI toolkit extensions. Here are the improvements in build 44249.

Fixes to Get-TkeSnapshotExtended:
1. Fixed to work on both VirtualCenter and when directly connected to ESX
2. Fixed the "Int32" problem, hopefully for good this time.

Also added some more storage-related cmdlets:
1. Get-TkeAvailableDisk returns disks that are available creating VMFS partitions.
2. Format-TkeDisk takes the output of Get-TkeAvailableDisk and puts a VMFS3 filesystem on the disk.

Here’s a short “how to” use the extensions:

Upgrade to Windows PowerShell 2.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP2).

Download Download the VI Toolkit (for Windows) 1.0.

Download the viToolkitExtension.psm1 module at Codeplex and place it somewhere on your local disk.

Use Add-Module "C:\Temp\viToolkitExtensions.psm1" in your PowerShell script

When you’re a PowerShell fanatic you probably installed the latest PowerShell update and you’re running your scripts on Windows PowerShell V2 Community Technology Preview 2 (CTP2). This version contains two shell’s, besides the PowerShell.exe your can also use the (Graphical PowerShell) GPowerShell.exe. Working with the standard shell is great but there are a lot of tools out there which can enrich your life as a scripter. At the 12th of December I’ll present the “Managing VMware VI3 with PowerShell” session at the Dutch VMUG event in Nieuwegein. This presentation contains some live demos of the following tools.

Here’s my PowerShell top five, hope to see you next week.

1.    PowerGUI
2.    PrimalForms 
3.    PowerGadgets 
4.    AdminScriptEditor 
5.    PowerShellPlus

Patrick Schneider created a new version of the PowerShell Remote Connector which can be used to call the VMware Remote Console (VMware VMRC). The user interface is a bit challenging especially when you’re running a lot of virtual machines. If you can think of any improvements or you have a few tips for Patrick your can reach him at s.patrick1982(nospam)@gmail.com. The new VMware Remote Console (VMware VMRC) allows accessing the virtual machine consoles independent of the Web-based management interface. In order to access VMware virtual machines, install VMware the VMRC application from VMware Virtual Server web interface or download VMware VMRC application for Windows from the Minicom web site.

You can download Patrick’s PowerShell script here, verbinden is German for Connect ;-)