PowerCLI - 5

The Virtualization EcoShell provides administrators with a free toolkit which allows them to build their own powerful virtualization systems management consoles. In addition, they can also benefit from the hundreds of members associated with the online community-driven website, The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI™) – www.thevesi.org. Scott Herold, author, virtualization expert and chief architect of the Virtualization EcoShell and VESI commented “While we are promoting the implementation of automated systems management and providing for free what many vendors still charge for, we know every single administrator managing a virtual infrastructure can take this freeware desktop application and wrap many value-added services around it for the benefit of their organizations.”

The beta release of the Virtualization EcoShell can be downloaded from here. The Virtualization EcoShell provides several key features and out-of-the-box use cases for administrators. These capabilities will allow them to get a strong sense of how to optimize, streamline, manage and automate their multi-platform virtual environments.

Continue reading "Vizioncore Announces the Beta Release of the..." »

John D. Cook over at the The Endeavour has written a small booklet, 10 pages, of things he wish someone had told him when he first started using Windows PowerShell.

The booklet PowerShell Day 1 lists some things that I wish someone had told me the first day I started using PowerShell. It is not a tutorial on PowerShell per se. There are many excellent tutorials out there, and these can be found via the links in the booklet. Instead, what this book covers is some of the environmental issues surrounding PowerShell that are harder to discover.

During the last episode of the PowerScripting Podcast, Scott Herold was interviewed by both co-hosts Jonathan Walz & Hal Rottenberg. There was another prominent person asking questions on chat. Carter Chanklin, Product Manager at VMware's End User Enablement was just as curious as I about tomorrows launch of the Virtualization EcoShell. Scott also revealed, Vizioncore’s vRanger 4.0 will offer its own cmd-lets.

Scott Herold, the driving force behind the TheVESI, just announced the public availability of a new freeware product called The Virtualization EcoShell.

I'm not talking "Free for 30 days and then we're going to rip 80% of the features away".  I'm not talking "Free....for only a few ESX Servers".  I'm talking 100% completely free of charge regardless of the size of your environment.  How's that for an April 15th surprise?

The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI™) is a community-based initiative to help extend virtualization management using Microsoft Windows PowerShell. Whether you are a novice looking for assistance in enhancing your virtualization administration practices or an expert looking to share your knowledge with others, theVESI.org is the place for you.

The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI) is a freeware development program that aims to enhance the virtualization administrative experience. Scott Herold has released the (private) alpha version yesterday, the public beta can be expected mid-April. To read the details about the Virtualization EcoShell – a Vizioncore freeware graphical toolkit, powered by Quest - click here. 

Andrew Kutz just posted a new Hyper9 Cmdlet on sourceforce.net called Out-DataSet.

Out-DataSet is an extremely useful and needed cmdlet. You can use it to pipe any type of data that can be formatted with the built-in cmdlet, Format-Table, into a typed Microsoft .NET System.Data.DataSet. This allows an unlimited manipulation of data that you simply cannot achieve with text globbing. This cmdlet is experimental in nature because it was achieved by reverse engineering the Format-Table cmdlet to pull the data directly from internal data structures that Microsoft does not expose via its public API. This was a necessary task in order to represent the data with 100% accuracy every single time.

Update : A facelift for lostcreations.com

While Andrew Kutz is working at Hyper9, lostcreations.com will become h9labs.com to reflect the bleeding edge R&D that he’s doing. The site redesign is primarily cosmetic, and lostcreations.com still works as a URL. Andrew is just trying to make sure that if you've been coming to his site to get the coolest software in the virtualization industry then you can just keep on coming. If, however, you are new to the game, then h9labs.com and h9labs.hyper9.com work as well.

Nick MacKechnie, Senior Technical Account Manager at Microsoft New Zealand, had a few queries over the last few weeks from customers asking for resources on Powershell and where to start. Here’s some free resources he has found. (via @michelroth)

Kirk Munro finished posting another release of the VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack with a few more enhancements.

This release greatly improves usability through the new icons that were added (and I mean *greatly* improves…the value the icons add is huge).  It’s also the first PowerPack release that takes advantage of some really cool Visio scripts that I’ve been working on.  The Visio scripts I’m referring to were largely inspired by Alan Renouf’s vDiagram script, although the Visio script I ended up with doesn’t look anything like the original.  I’m itching to talk more about those scripts, but I want to write a blog post specifically on that topic so watch for more on this in the next few days.  For now I’ll simply point out that to use the Visio functionality, you have to download the additional VESI_Visio.zip file that was added to the VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack document page and install it as per the instructions in that document (see the “How to enable vDiagram support” section).  Visio 2007 is required.

Revision history:

March 9, 2009 (2.1.5)
- added icons to the tree as well as the items in the grid.
- fixed a few minor defects that could occur before you connected to a host.
- added vDiagram actions to datacenter and cluster objects.

Stuart Radnidge has created a new section on his vinternals weblog. It’s called VI Toolkit Mastery and it’s a real joy to read.

:-)

This section is dedicated to VI Toolkit techniques you can use to unleash the full power of the VMware Infrastructure API. This was initially a set of 3 posts I made in February 2009. Since it would be a fucking long read from start to finish, I have retained the original post headings to break it up a bit. I imagine this page will be updated as new features come out both in PowerShell and the VI Toolkit, or as I discover new features of the incredibly powerful shell that is… errr, PowerShell.

Scott Herold has finally gotten around to creating some videos of PowerGUI in action when managing a VMware infrastructure. This extends his primer on getting started with PowerShell and PowerGUI. He has created 5 new videos that are best viewed in the following order:

1. Establishing Connections to your VMware Infrastructure using the PowerGUI Console
2. Navigate your VMware Infrastructure using the PowerGUI Console
3. Execute Links and Actions in the PowerGUI Console
4. Create and Save Filters using the PowerGUI Console
5. Using the PowerGUI Script Editor