PowerCLI - 9

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

VMwareScripting.com is a VMware Scripting Forum and has been up for only a few weeks. It's already filled with a lot of useful information. The man behind VMwareScripting.com  is Eric Sarakaitis, he works for American Electric Power as a systems administrator, where he has a pretty large VMware deployment.

He has recently started using the VI toolkit with a few of his co-workers. Having trouble finding what he was looking for in the VMware forums, he decided to start his own collection and offer it up free to the public.

This afternoon, I was jammed in traffic again. Luckily I burned the MP3 of the PowerScripting Podcast with Carter Shanklin on a CD and listened to the broadcast in my car. At one point Carter was referring to a new verbose logging option which enables you to intercept the soap traffic between you VI-Client and the vCenter server. This gives you the opportunity to find out how to call the really advanced stuff from PowerShell. Carter used it to fix a bug in a resize command-let. When I finally got home, I had to find out the command options and was staring at one of the most beautiful log files I ever saw, it’s brilliant.

Just start your VI-Client with the following options and you will receive massive output.

VpxClient.exe -log +sd

You can find the log files here: C:\Users\Eric Sloof\AppData\Local\VMware\vpx vi-client.txt

PowerShellPlus

PowerShellPlus v2.1 Beta is live and publicly available! here's the exciting information about an early look at what the PowerShellPlus team has been working on. PowerShellPlus version 2.1 introduces several new and cool features focused on reducing the PowerShell learning curve, increasing the productivity of PowerShell development and exercising the capabilities of PowerShell 2.0. The new features include:

• Code sharing – Enables you to leverage the wealth of scripts that reside in the PowerShell.com and PoshCode.org libraries. Increase your productivity by quickly and easily searching and grabbing the scripts from those libraries. You can also submit your own scripts to the PowerShell.com library directly from PowerShell Plus Editor
• Visual Basic support – The PowerShell Plus Editor can now edit and run Visual Basic scripts
• STA mode support – Enables you to produce pretty cool looking GUI’s with Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) using PowerShell 2.0.
• PowerShell Assembly Detection – Gives the Learning Center an auto-upgrade path if PowerShell v2 CTP3 is detected and then displays the most up-to-date information
• Learning Center Auto-Load - Makes searching for a request with a single match much easier to use since the topic will load automatically, saving extra keystrokes
• Cmdlet parameter position – Shows you additional information in the code completion popup window about parameters including position and type
• Console size overlay – Shows you the height and width of the Console when you resize it
• Additional Sample Scripts - Active Directory, IIS 7.0 and MySQL
• PowerShell v2 CTP3 Support – Including Block Comments and the $Profile variable  

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.