Today I found myself needing to find all hosts that were in a state other than connected within a datacenter. It’s only a one-liner and I’m sure you can (or have) found it elsewhere, but here it is again for reference: Get-Datacenter -Name "ProfessionalVMware" | Get-VMHost | Where { $_.State -ne "Connected" } | Select
-> Continue reading PowerCLI Tidbit of the Day
This post actually has it’s roots in a practical and useful change in VMware’s “delete all” snapshot functionality. For the details, I strongly suggest you go off to Duncan’s page and read all about it. It was that post that in turn generated quite a lot of twitter buzz around some additional features, or naming
-> Continue reading Roll-Dice – PowerCLI & Fun with VMware Snapshots
For those of you who don’t have a copy of Hal’s PowerCLI book (if you don’t, you should)… and for those that do, but would like a supplemental reference for the VMware PowerCLI cmdlets, check VMware’s PowerCLI cmdlet reference. Have already used it to good ends this week. Example: New-VM added a DiskStorageFormat parameter… completely
-> Continue reading Online PowerCLI Reference
Today’s post is brought to us by Chris, a member of the VMware community who wields some powerful Louisianan VooDoo magic (and PowerCLI). Chris uses this to show us how to take a csv file in, and use it to attach a VM to a dVS switch as well as adding the VMXNET3 nic to
-> Continue reading PowerCLI – Nexus1000v and VMXNET3
While all of PowerCLI is remarkable in both it’s power and ease of use, there are some cmdlets that do not get as much airtime as they deserve. One of those, is Invoke-VMScript. From Get-Help InvokeVMScript NAME Invoke-VMScript SYNOPSIS Executes the specified PowerShell script in the guest OS of each of the specified
-> Continue reading The Most Awesome PowerCLI Cmdlet You Aren’t Using
Today I needed to disable the VMware tools/console copy & paste functionality… on a lot of VMs (well… more than one is a lot). In doing this, I came across these directions from vmzare: How To disable copy and paste operations between the guest operating system and remote console ? 1. Log on to the
-> Continue reading Disabling Copy Paste – The PowerCLI way
I recently got a comment on a post I had done a while back on VMware tools and Time Sync. While the one-liners there may be useful, they don’t particularly explain how they got to the end results. With that in mind, today I hope to explain some of the logic used when you need
-> Continue reading A Quick PowerCLI Lesson – Digging for Info (Who Powered Off that VM)
Ever have to log into a the console of an ESX VM… over a slow connection? Then you’ll know all about the character repeat that comes along with that. If you haven’t experienced this… consider yourself lucky. It is especially interesting when trying to type passwords. So how do you defeat this? You set the
-> Continue reading PowerCLI Script of the Week – Set-Keydelay.ps1
While searching for some snippets of VMware PowerCLI code earlier in the week I came across some awesome resources, both resources I’ve not seen/used before, as well as those that I’ve used, but have not linked prior. Note, that most of these are just the PowerCLI section of an equally awesome blog. VMware PowerCLI Community
-> Continue reading 11 Awesome PowerCLI Resources
Time is critical. In VMs this criticality is even more pronounced. Time slips… CPU instructions go askew, and things get weird. That said, there are situations when you may wish to disable the built in VMware Tools Time sync service… completely. What do I mean by completely? Well, even with the tools time sync set
-> Continue reading Time Is Marching On… Disabling TimeSync, Completely.
What is VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)? I’d start with reviewing the overview page. VMware Fault Tolerance, based on vLockstep technology, provides zero downtime, zero data loss continuous availability for your applications, without the cost and complexity of traditional hardware or software clustering solutions. Pretty awesome no? FT has it’s limits (1 vCPU, etc) and it
-> Continue reading Scheduling VMware’s FT (Fault Tolerance)
Ok, So maybe they didn’t save the world, but the sure saved my weekend. Rather than spend a lot of time on the intro, let’s dive right in. These will be in Problem/PowerShell/Output format. The Problem: More spaghetti environments, this time we need to count some resources. The first counts CPU, the second Memory. Yes
-> Continue reading Four PowerCLI One-Liners That Saved The World!
One of the most amazing new features of vSphere is the ability to hot add hardware into a supported guest OS. However, when you need to upgrade your 20 node web farm, all of the right clicks and slider moves can become cumbersome. That is where VMware PowerCLI (PowerShell) comes to the rescue! A few
-> Continue reading vSphere 4 Hot Add Hardware and PowerShell
With all of my recent ftPerl love, I’ve found that the quickest way to at least start troubleshooting it is to reconfigure the offending host for HA. This is fine if working in a small environment, or on a small number of hosts, but there are a metric ton of these hosts gone sideways all
-> Continue reading Reconfigure for HA the PowerShell Way!
It was a success, at least I think so, having survived it. We had about 26-28 folks in the room. Low numbers I’m sure because they bumped us from 4p to 3p, and not all of the materials got updated accordingly. Speaking with the door monitor, she confirmed this, and there was at least another
-> Continue reading Virtualization Congress 2009 – Thanks for Coming to My Party
That there is a pic from last nights room check. It doesn’t do the size of the room justice. We’re now polishing up the last few details around the presentation, and cleaning it up a bit. For those that are going to be here we’ll be getting into the nitty gritty of the three major
-> Continue reading Managing VI with PowerShell – Virtualization Congress 2009, It’s Now Real
UUIDs are wonderful! Really. They’re just not all that easy to get to, at least not when you need more than a few of them at a time. That is where this script comes in: # get-uuid.ps1 # # Takes either a VMHost or VM object from the pipeline, returns the corresponding UUID. Begin {
-> Continue reading New Script – Get VM or ESX Host UUIDs (get-uuid.ps1)
So one of the things that did happen whilst I was away, and that does bear repeating (as it’s not marketing fluff) is the Virtualization Eco Shell Initiative and their beta release landing (Thanks Virtua-al). The goal of the Vizioncore Virtualization EcoShell is to provide a freeware desktop application for novice and expert IT administrators
-> Continue reading The Turtles Are Upon Us – The VESI
This post started out as a bit of nonsense. A bit of an exploration into what could be done via the API using PowerShell. What better place to start I thought than the MOTD. Who doesn’t love the way VMware greets you… sometimes repeatedly in the same session with it. Then, I got to thinking…
-> Continue reading Random VI Hardening Tip – Automating MOTD Updates
While glancing over at PoSH today (the tiny turtle) I was inspired to do a bit of thinking and talking about using PoSH. Specifically the VI Toolkit, it really wouldn’t be blog worth otherwise would it? What I got thinking on, and what someone on irc clued me into, was storing credentials. Why store credentials?
-> Continue reading PoSH Article of the Week! – Secure Credential Storage