PowerCLI

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 )

VMware has challenged the world’s VI administrators to a contest of skill, creativity and raw scripting talent. I submitted a script to the VMware Infrastructure Toolkit (for Windows) Scripting Contest and hope to make a chance at winning a great price in this contest.

• First Prize: Airfare, hotel and admission to VMworld 2008 Las Vegas or $5,000 USD Cash Prize
• Second Prize: Macbook Air with VMware Fusion or $2,500 USD
• Third Prize: Xbox 360 Elite or $500 USD

At August 30, 2008, 11:59pm PST the contest was closed so I uploaded my final version of the Resource Pool Calculator yesterday evening. The following list shows you who the 23 contesters are and what amazing scripts they’ve created.

• LucD - Guest Provisioning System (cloning from templates)
• tzamora - Vmware Infraestructure Power Documenter
• esloof - Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator
• rt7500 - VI-Cluster-Audit
• Kyle Weir - VM Service Report v1.0
• GordonG - Virtual Machine Failover
• shambo - PowerAlarm Manager
• rsgqjj - Get-VIReports
• Adidas6 - Virtual Environment Overview Report
• slx86 - clonevdi
• ibeerens - VMware Healthcheck script
• dbbaskette - powerVDI
• CSummers311 - Rescan HBAs
• olan025 ESXi - Builder
• Jonwalz - Get-VDMData
• justingrote - Create Disaster Recovery Hard Drive
• tobru - VCB Backup Script
• ITS_TDT - Business Continuity Roll over Script
• RobMokkink - Deploy VM's based on a template from a .csv
• alanrenouf - Report into MS Word
• MorDrakka - Find Orphaned VMDK's
• hugopeeters - Get-StorageInfo 85
• ewmccarty - function destroy-network
• RobMokkink - Add/Remove active directory user accounts
• ewmccarty - Shutdown VM in specific Resource Pools
• Chris Uys - Find snapshots and send email
• RobMokkink - HBA Loadbalance script

They really did a great job and posted high quality scripts. VMware plans to announce prizewinners on September 7th, 2008 in the VMTN forums. The judges are:

VMware representative: Antonio Dias, Architect; Carter Shanklin, Product Manager
Industry representative: Lee Holmes and Bruce Payette
Community representative: Hal Rottenberg; Automation Engineer

ASE continues to innovate with its recent release of version 3.5. This latest release introduces active debugger support for PowerShell scripts, several new templates for the Logon Script Builder and enhancements to the script formatting feature. The Active Debugger integrated with ASE now provides full support for both VBScript and PowerShell. When debugging, you can even hover over values for tooltips that provide details on the object as well as a hyperlink to take you to the objects' listing in the Locals window. Finding problems in scripts just got a whole lot easier with this intuitive and easy to use debugger. If you have not checked out the Logon Script Builder (LSB), now is the time. Even if you have already been using the Logon Script Builder, you will immediately PowerShell being the exception, it is necessary to rely upon a third-party control in order to render forms and interact with them using a scripting language. Admin Script Editor provides support for KiXforms, a freeware control deployed as a single DLL file which you can leverage by any language supporting COM. As PowerShell may address the .NET Framework directly, it can create native Windows forms, something ScriptForm Designer also fully supports.

You can download the PowerShell script of the example above : ase.ps1

Imagine you work in an environment with more than 1500 virtual machines and the numbers  are still growing rapidly. When you work with a lot of resource pools, it’s an administrative burden to recalculate all your pools after you deploy some new virtual machines.  The Resource Pool Calculator scans all your pools and automatically adjust the reservation for memory and CPU.

For those who haven’t had much exposure to the Powershell Toolkit and what it can do, there is a recording of a webinar presented by the Carter Shanklin at this link. It is pretty basic and intended for those with little or no exposure to the toolkit.

If you’ve ever wondered what it is or why you might want to use it (like disconnecting the CD from 45 or 50 VMs so you can VMotion them without having to deal with the right-click – pick-from-the-pop-up-menu process manually 45-50 times) then you might want to check this out.

More recorded webcasts are available on : http://www.vmware.com/a/webcasts/recorded/

VMware is challenging the world’s VI administrators to a contest of skill, creativity and raw scripting talent. The following 8 PowerShell contesters have already uploaded their script.
The panel of judges; Antonio Dias, Carter Shanklin, and Hal Rottenberg must make a choice from the following list:

• Alanrenouf - Report into MS Word 
• Hugopeeters  -Get-StorageInfo 
• Chris Uys  -Find snapshots and send email to user/users with 
• RobMokkink - Deploy VM's based on a template from a .csv 
• RobMokkink - HBA Loadbalance script 
• Esloof  Dynamic - Resource Pool Calculator
• MorDrakka - Find Orphaned VMDK's
• Dbbaskette - powerVDI

I’m running with the Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator, this script recalculates all your resource pools. Depending on the numbers of virtual machines per resource pool, the number of reservations for memory and CPU is automatically lifted after running this the Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator.

Imagine you work in an environment with more than 1500 virtual machines and the numbers are still rapidly growing. When you work with a lot of resource pools, it’s an administrative burden to recalculate all your pools after you deploy some new virtual machines. This Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator recalculates all your resource pools. Depending on the numbers of virtual machines per resource pool, the number of reservations for memory and CPU is automatically lifted after running this the Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator. VMware is challenging the world’s VI administrators to a contest of skill, creativity and raw scripting talent. I uploaded the script, let’s wait and see.

Carter Shanklin and the toolkit's architect Andrey Anastasov have written a nice post explaining object-by-name.

"For its Beta, VI Toolkit implemented the get-then-modify usage pattern. Examples include Get-VM "My VM" | Start VM and Start-VM (Get-VM "My VM"). While constituting the very backbone of PowerShell, this pattern isn't always convenient. And, as VMworld user feedback revealed, it’s not intuitive at all. So, for version 1.0 we added what we call object-by-name.

VMware is challenging the world’s VI administrators to a contest of skill, creativity and raw scripting talent. Dbbaskette is the first one who submitted his PowerVDI script. This is a script that 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.

With the update 2 release just launched, everyone is wondering about the next version of VMware ESX. When you do a Google search for ESX 4.0, you’ll find a lot of speculation. But what’s true? A recently released help file part of the VMware Infrastructure (VI) Toolkit (for Windows) 1.0 already refers to the new version names.

Get-VMHostModule Specifies the host module name. The valid names for an ESX 4.0 are:

aacraid.o
adp94xx.o
ahci.o
aic79xx.o

Valid modules names for Visor are:

AMDIommu
aacraid.o
adp94xx.o
ahci.o
aic79xx.o
ata_piix.o