PowerCLI

Last week I had a genuine bloggers-lunch at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration with Matthijs Haverink, blogger at Virtualfuture and Rob Mokkink, the author of the HBA load balance script. We talked about various topics and I told them why I created the Resource Pool Calculator and how important it can be in large organizations, where virtual machines are deployed rapidly. Driven by my enthusiasm Rob completely rewrote my calculator script and added some real cool functions like logging to it.

This Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator recalculates all your resource pools. Depending on the number of virtual machines per resource pool, the number of reservations for memory and CPU is automatically lifted after running the Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator. The script also respects the existing individual virtual machine reservations and adds those value’s to the total RP sum.

You can get your copy here.

Carter's team created some really cool VI Toolkit 1.5 video's.

Managing Storage with VI Toolkit 1.5
Some important fixes in VI Toolkit 1.5
Get-Stat Improvements in VI Toolkit 1.5
Resizing Guest Disks with Invoke-VMScript
HA and DRS in VI Toolkit 1.5

Carter Chanklin, Product Manager at VMware's End User Enablement, released a new version of the VI toolkit. The VI Toolkit 1.5 team has added 32 new cmdlets, enhanced the existing cmdlets, and fixed tons of bugs. If you’re the sort of person who loves fine print, you can also have a look at their release notes. The release notes has a great table that shows all the differences between 1.0 and 1.5.

The VI Toolkit 1.5 team

Wil is a software developer who has a passion for Open Source and VMware. The VI-Toolkit.com wiki can be used as a location to store scripts and snippets of source code for managing VMware hosts and their virtual machines. This new site will contain information for developers and administrators about extending and managing their VMware virtual environments. This includes everything from automation on virtual machines in VMware player up to managing your Virtual Infrastructure using the available Software Development Kits from VMware.  The focus is trying to provide examples about the source code. Over time this will hopefully include a repository of scripts and helpful snippets of code for all of you. There are currently 389 pages stored in the wiki database. Almost all of the pages are categorized, so using the categories landing page to navigate is a good way to quickly see what is currently available for you.

I discovered a great weblog called Get-Admin, it was started by Glenn Sizemore, who asked Andrew Sullivan to join a few weeks afterward.  Since then they have focused on IT operations, administration and automation, with a more specific focus on virtualization in the enterprise.  They occasionally post other topics (databases, POSH related to non-virtualization tasks), but they are both passionate about virtualization and automation of administration tasks.

Andrew Sullivan works for a very large IT contracting company as a virtualization administrator.  He has a Linux and Solaris background, consequentially he tends to focus on managing the ESX hosts directly by leveraging the VI Perl Toolkit to accomplish automation tasks.  Previously he has been a PHP developer for enterprise web applications.

Glenn Sizemore works for the same company.  He is a very talented Windows administrator with a networking background.  His primary interest is PowerShell and evangelism of its benefits, but the focus of many of his posts is on how PowerShell can help to quickly and effectively automate VI administration.

http://get-admin.com/blog/

After the latest release of PowerGui’s VMware PowerPack, the VI Toolkit adoption seems to be skyrocketing. Dmitry Sotnikov opened up a new Virtualization discussions forum which will be hosted by Scott Herold, Quest’s Lead Architect of Virtualization Solutions. Scott is also bringing vmguru.com back to life and posted the article Getting Started with PowerShell and PowerGUI in your Virtual Infrastructure. You’ll find a quick 5-10 minute primer to get started with PowerGUI and PowerShell in a VMware Infrastructure.