PowerCLI - 5

Pablo Roesch : Folks, Our marketing team put together a nice poster with all the PowerCLI commandlets for your enjoyment. We handed some out during VMworld and have a few hardcopies left. Here is a PDF for folks that are interested. Regards, Pablo Download Powercli-poster.

http://blogs.vmware.com/developer/2009/10/get-your-powercli-poster-on-.html

You definitely have to attend Scott Herold’s session (DS-16) at the VMware Developer day or Carter Shanklin’s PowerShell session at the VMworld 2009. In those two sessions you might see the new version of the  Virtualization EcoShell 1.2 in action. Since I’m not attending but delivering a VMware ICM training instead :-( Scott Herold was kind enough to let me do some pre-testing with version 1.2. The upgrade went smooth. The first new feature that stroke my eye was the Chart tab in the Grid. After some customization , I was able to create really cool charts. You can select different types like Area, Column, Doughnut, Line, Scatter, Stacked Area and Stacked Column. The horizontal axes labels hold the category and can be fed by everything that’s measurable. You can also select multiple legend entries.

 http://www.thevesi.org

Onyx generates code to help you solve your toughest automation challenges.

See the full demonstration with a complete explanation of how to use Onyx at VMworld -- session VM2241. Bring your business card if you want to be 1 of ten beta (maybe VMware should make that alpha) testers.

I’ve stumbled on a great demo created by someone from China, it’s about controlling virtual distributed switches with PowerCLI. I’m trying to contact this (137145shi) guy because he didn’t post a download link or a homepage URL. The only thing I can see in the video is that he’s copying some VDSAutomation.dll files.

We? developed a PowerShell snap-in to manage vSphere vDS , which could help VI admins a lot. This vedio is a demo about vDS management cmdlets implemented in PowerCLI. There are some preliminary vDS cmdlets showed in this demo and they are listed as follows.

1.Get-VDS
2.Get-DVPortgroup
3.New-VDS
4.New-DVPortgroup
5.Add-VDSHost
6.Remove-VDSHost
7.Set-VDS
8.Set-DVPortgroup
9.Remove-VDS
10.Remove-DVPortgroup

update : Here is the supervisor's official response:

"Sorry this tool is still a bit unbaked as of now, hence no download information. In the mean while, you may attend the upcoming VMworld 2009 TA3521 session, where a number of 3rd party and/or open source Virtual Switch/Networking related management and troubleshooting tools are going to be demonstrated and discussed for the first time."

New in this release: dockable windows in the main console, new message pane, support for Posh v2 modules, and configurable, recently opened files function that remembers your tabs in the editor.  See the release notes attachment for details.

http://www.powergui.org/downloads.jspa

Alan Renouf has created a really cool PowerShell script at http://virtu-al.net

This script will save you time and resources.

I have been using this script for the past month and it has highlighted a number of issues which would have been harder to find without it.

Daily Report does what it says on the tin, it runs as a scheduled task before you get into the office to present you with key information about your infrastructure in a nice easily readable format.

This script picks on the key areas of the virtual infrastructure and reports it all in one place so all you do in the morning is check your email.

One of they key things about this report is if there is no issue in a particular place you will not receive that section in the email, for example if there are no datastores with less than 5% free space (configurable) then the disk space section will not show in the email, this ensures that you have only the information you need in front of you when you get into the office.

So what areas does this script report on ?

Firstly it will give you a very brief summary detailing some of the critical information, it does not list every name and how many cpu’s or how much memory your vms and hosts have as that would be a audit report not a daily report.

http://www.virtu-al.net/2009/07/14/powercli-daily-report/