PowerCLI - 9

The Windows Forms ProgressBar control indicates the progress of an action by displaying an appropriate number of rectangles arranged in a horizontal bar. When the action is complete, the bar is filled. Progress bars are commonly used to give the user an indication of how long to wait for a protracted action to complete—for instance, when a large file is being loaded.

 #Let's create a Progressbar
 $objProgressBar = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.ProgressBar
 $objProgressBar.Value = 0
 $objProgressBar.Location = New-Object System.Drawing.Size(12,97)
 $objProgressBar.Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size(260,14)
 $objForm.Controls.Add($objProgressBar)
 $objForm.Topmost = $True
 $objForm.Add_Shown({$objForm.Activate()})

You can set a value with the following command : {$objProgressBar.Value =50}

The Maximum and Minimum properties define the range of values to represent the progress of a task. The Minimum property is typically set to a value of 0, and the Maximum property is typically set to a value indicating the completion of a task. For example, to properly display the progress when copying a group of files, the Maximum property could be set to the total number of files to be copied.

The Value property represents the progress that the application has made toward completing the operation. The value displayed by the ProgressBar only approximates the current value of the Value property. Based on the size of the ProgressBar, the Value property determines when to display the next block or increase the size of the bar.

This is the slide deck Carter Shanklin used during his talk "Managing VMware with PowerShell" at VMworld 2008. Some video snippets of the presentation are also available at the VMware PowerShell community.

PowerShell is Microsoft's new technology for management and automation. VMware has built an incredibly powerful and easy-to-use toolkit on top of PowerShell that makes provisioning and configuring simple, whether you are dealing with 1 VM or 1000. In this session you’ll see numerous examples of how easy it is to use PowerShell to automate VMware Virtual Infrastructure management, and get all the information you need to get started right away.

Speakers: 

Dmitry Sotnikov - Manager, New Product Research Quest Software
Carter Shanklin - Product Manager VMware, Inc.
Andrey Anastasov - Senior Member of Technical Staff VMware, Inc.

VMworld 2008 | PowerShell presentation from Eric Sloof on Vimeo.

Carter is a Product Manager for VMware specializing in APIs and SDKs. As a former developer, he knows how frustrating learning a new technology platform can be, so he always stresses simplicity and shallow learning curves.

This afternoon I ran into LucD, the winner of the Vmware PowerShell scripting contest and took the opportunity to ask him a few questions. I was wondering if he used the 5000 $ first prize to go to the VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas and he did. Another question is his real name? Just click on the play button and listen for yourself.

SAPIEN Technologies is pleased to offer a number of free tools and utilities for use in your own scripts.

File Transfer Protocol Automation Object
A COM component that can be used from VBScript, PowerShell, KiXtart, or any other COM-compatible language. Allows you to connect to remote FTP servers (SFTP not supported, although you can specify login credentials) and Get/Put files. A quick and easy way to automate FTP. Samples included.

SAPIEN PowerShell Extensions (PshX-SAPIEN) v1.2
A collection of useful cmdlets to add into Windows PowerShell, such as logon script cmdlets for checking group membership, memory-inventory cmdlets, database cmdlets, and more. Instructions are included in the downloadable ZIP file. Now includes VB source code - use with VB Express or PrimalScript Enterprise.

Logon Script Generator
This free tool is an HTA that generates a fully functional VBScript logon script. Now you can script without scripting! At the very least you can quickly generate the foundation of a VBScript logon script that you can further modify and extend. The HTA generates VBScript code, lets you preview it and then save it to a file. Once saved, you can edit the code in PrimalScript with the click of a button. If you don’t have PrimalScript, the saved script can be opened in Notepad. Requirements: Windows XP and an Active Directory domain.

Windows PowerShell Help Tool
Displays detailed help for all PowerShell cmdlets - a convenient, on-screen reference while working in PowerShell, or when developing scripts. Note that PrimalScript 4.1 Professional, Enterprise, and Universal editions display this information in the new "Help" tab right within the product.

WMI Explorer
Find every WMI namespace and class on your computer, and see each class' properties, methods, and so forth - makes working with WMI a snap. Has some great surprise functionality - be sure to read the docs! Useful for scripters as well as for .NET programmers.

PrimalTask
A standalone version of the "To Do" browser to PrimalScript 4.1 Enterprise and Universal. Allows you to create project task lists so that you don't forget anything.

FileTypes
A graphical utility to help manage the file type associations - what application opens what documents - on your system. Especially useful for re-associating files with PrimalScript (or another application) if they're not correct.

Via afokkema over at ICT-Freak

If you want to distribute your PowerShell script as an executable, you really should take a look at the AdminScriptEditor. The ScriptPackager has been enhanced to provide support for HTA and PowerShell scripts. You can now optionally include the KiXtart or AutoIt interpreters in the additional files of a package script with the simple check of a box. You even have the ability to have packaged script output directed to the current console window and if you add a DLL to the list of additional files to be packaged, you may have them automatically register themselves during package execution with a simple check of a box! Coming soon: dynamic PowerShell cmdlet installation features!

I created an executable from my Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator script. DRPC-Script.exe

First prize: A trip to VMworld, goes to LucD for his script, Luc used the AdminScript editor to build a userinterface around a guest provisioning system. LucD is a great contributor to the VI Toolkit forum and help a lot of people.

Second prize: a Macbook air, goes to tzamora for his script, VMware Infrastructure Power Documenter. This scipt makes 9 different reports about VMWare Infrastructure in less than 500 lines of code (including support for Filtering and Charting).

Third prize: Dan Baskette is the proud owner of our third prize, an XBox 360 Elite, for his script powerVDI. Dan's script takes a Gold Desktop Image and snaps it multiple times by utilizing a backend EMC Celerra Device and iSCSI Luns. It then lunmasks the new luns, surfaces them on esx, searches for vmx files, Imports the new desktops that were discovered into VC and creates a pool and populates it in the VDM Connection Broker. It leverages putty for SSH connectivity (free) , Quest ActiveRoles Extensions (free), and the powershell community extensions UPDATE: Removed dependency on Community Extensions and now rely on the Datastore Provided to locate the gold image.

I really doubt if the third prize meets one of the criteria: Usefulness of script – how broadly applicable is your script to other VI administrators?  I’ve seen better scripts....

Congratulation to all of you. :-(

icomasoft® VI PowerScripter (currently beta 1) is the first and absolutely unique VMware VI Client plug-in for a tight integration of user-defined PowerShell scripts into the object repository of VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5.

This plug-in delivers some predefined scripts for common admin tasks and is capable of handling hundreds of custom scripts for direct usage from a dynamically generated context menu within VI Client (for connections to VirtualCenter, ESX 3.5 or ESX 3i).

Thanks to its absolute flexibility, this powerful software is a “must” for professional users looking to administrate the virtual infrastructure in compliance with business-aligned functions in a simple and yet most effective manner.

I added a little gimmick to my Resource Pool script. It actually talks to you, and tell you what’s selected,  after hitting the exit button you’ll receive greetings from Eric Sloof. :-)  SAPI is short for Speech Application Programming Interface (Speech API). SAPI is built into Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista; if you’re running either of those operating systems then you already have everything you need to add voice and sound effects to your PowerShell scripts. Just paste the following code at your PowerShell prompt.

$Voice = New-Object -com SAPI.SpVoice
$Voice.Speak( "The resource pool is adjusted", 1 )