Thursday, December 11. 2008
Eric Siebert's Top 10 PowerShell scripts
Search the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide
The new online compatibility guide provides a single point of access for all VMware hardware compatibility guides. The new search tool streamlines the HCL posting process and offers advanced search capabilities and the ability to save the guide(s) or search results in a .PDF or csv format.
The new hardware compatibility guide replaces the following legacy PDF-format HCLs:
- VMware ESX 3.0.x and above version Systems Compatibility Guide
- VMware ESX 3.0.x and above version SAN (storage) Compatibility Guide
- VMware ESX 3.0.x and above version I/O Compatibility Guide
- VMware View Client Compatibility Guide
Wednesday, December 10. 2008
A whiter shade of green
I must admit, I don’t use the maps that often. Especially in a large VI3 environment the maps are turning into a big black star. But checking VMotion compatibility with maps can be a time saver. Just select the virtual machine and hit the map tab. What I didn’t know is that there are several grades of green presented behind your ESX servers. The grades are showing up if your ESX servers are VMotion compatible. If one of your ESX servers is under a heavy load it’ll show a light green colour. On the other hand, when one of your ESX server is not CPU intensive at all, it will show up dark green. Here’s the proof.
PeetersOnline | Get VMware Disk Usage with Powershell
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.
Tuesday, December 9. 2008
New version of the VI toolkit extensions
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
nworks SPI provides access to 300 VMware-specific metrics
Certified Smart Plug-in for VMware for HP Software Operations Manager. An agentless way to bring VMware monitoring into your enterprise management console Leverage your investment in HP Software Operations Manager to confidently give operations personnel the ability to assume routine VMware infrastructure monitoring. Free up VMware professionals to focus on troubleshooting, capacity planning and other specialized tasks.
The innovative nworks Collector does not require agent software on ESX hosts, which eliminates any risk of agent software impacting ESX availability. Because the nworks SPI uses the VMware API, ESXi is fully supported.
Version 4.0 includes new features such as CIM SMASH hardware sensor status and alerts, graphical representations of data stores, flexible collection intervals, VirtualCenter 2.5 performance counters, and more!
The nworks SPI provides access to 300 VMware-specific metrics – data like CPU, memory, disk and network utilization by host and guest. It also provides access to VMware-specific health and performance metrics like CPU % Ready and Balloon Memory, and can provide composite information around VMware clusters and resource pools. The SPI also includes the event stream from VirtualCenter, VMware topology and configuration information and a dynamic service map of your virtual environment.