Products - 2

I’ve created a new Virtualization EcoShell PowerPack with only one Script Node and it’s called “CPUID System Information“ which shows the VMHost CPU Info.  The inspiration for building this new PowerPack came from VMware’s evangelist Richard Garsthagen who has built the well known Visual Basic Application, VMware CPU Host Info.  “CPUID System Information” is completely based on PowerShell and VMware’s PowerCLI. The script is able to show you which features (CPUIDs) are available on your ESX server’s CPUs. Besides checking VMotion compatibility it also shows you:

• Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) levels which simplifies VMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations. EVC automatically configures server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers.
• All the important CPU features like: VMX, MONITOR/MWAIT , SSE3, SSSE3 ,SSE4.1 ,SSE4.2 ,CMPXCHG8B ,CMPXCHG16B ,NX/XD ,Long mode support ,RDTSCP ,3DNow! ,3DNow! Extensions ,FFXSR ,Prefetch instructions.

I’ve three versions available for download.

The first one can be used as a PowerPack in the Virtualization EcoShell.

     http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/uploads/NTPRO.NL.powerpack

Continue reading "CPUID System Information " »

I created my first VESI PowerPack with a little help from Alan Renouf, Darin Pendergraft and Carter Shanklin. Before I’m going to show off, first let’s explain what a PowerPack actually is.
A PowerPack is a collection of PowerShell scripts that are used to extend the Virtualization EcoShell administrative console. These scripts are stored inside of nodes, links or actions all of which are used to add functionality into the console.



Carters Shanklin’s WebEx sessions are awesome, he demoed a well written series of PowerShell scripts. With one of his scripts you’re able to collect the %RDY time statistics for all your Virtual Machines. The most common cause of high ready time is trying to get too much work out of too little hardware. Often this condition is observable when ready time is high and total host CPU utilization is also very high. The only fix for this is to back off the load on the system. VMs should be migrated off or processor resources should be increased. I combined Carter’s script with a new feature in the Virtualization EcoShell and created my first PowerPack.

If you’re interested in creating your own PowerPack take a look at the “PowerGUI Basic PowerPack Authoring” created by Darin Pendergraft. Also keep an eye on Alan Renouf’s website http://www.virtu-al.net/ , he’s going to launch a real cool VESI PowerPack with all his PowerShell scripts, I’ve received the beta and it already looks impressive.

 Here's my PowerPack: http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/uploads/NTPRO.NL.powerpack

I recently posted an article about capturing screenshots of virtual machines. The PowerShell code is based on VMware’s PowerCLI and the VI Toolkit Extensions. The user interface was created with Sapien’s free PrimalForms. I received a lot of comments asking me if this script could be of any practical use in a production environment, and I must admit I had some thoughts about it too. This morning I received a real cool PowerShell script from Carter Shanklin, VMware’s Product Manager, End User Enablement. His script is able to run a screenshot through OCR and extract anything interesting from it.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) extracts text and layout information from document images. With the help of Microsoft Office Document Imaging Library (MODI), which is contained in the Office 2003 and 2007 package, you can easily integrate OCR functionality into your own applications. In combination with the MODI Document Viewer control, you will have complete OCR support with only a few lines of code.

In the image you see the "Virtual Machine Blue Screen Detector" in action, first it captures a screenshot of a virtual machine. Secondly it uses the Toolkit Extensions to copy it to the local drive. When the PNG image is saved on the local drive, it’s converted to TIFF. The TIFF image will be used to extract the text using OCR.

Now, how can we create a blue screen? We could use this utility, “StartBlueScreen.exe” just as it sounds, allows you to crash the Windows operating system by initiating a Blue Screen of Death according to 5 parameters that you specify from command-line. StartBlueScreen.exe loads a very small device driver named NirSoftBlueScreenDriver.sys that calls the crash API function of Windows Kernel (KeBugCheckEx) with the 5 crash parameters that you specify in the command-line.

You can get your copy of the Virtual Machine Blue Screen Detector here.

Update : Luc Dekens (@LucD22) Great script, nice how it brings different features together. Now could you make it read out the BSOD ? ;-) Sure Luc, here you go.

VMware ESX4 and the new vCenter server both offer a lot of new  SDK properties and methods. One of the new methods is CreateScreenshot_Task which is part of the  ManagedObjectReference:VirtualMachine. This method creates a screenshot of the virtual machine console, the image is saved as a portable network graphics (.png) file in the virtual machine folder. This features is normally used by HA Virtual Machine Monitoring. The Virtual Machine Monitoring feature uses the heartbeat information that VMware Tools captures as a proxy for guest operating system availability. This allows VMware HA automatically to reset or restart individual virtual machines that have lost their ability to heartbeat. Before resetting or restarting the Virtual Machine the vCenter server creates a snapshot of a possible BSOD.  I created a PowerShell script which initiates and copies the screenshots of 9 Virtual Machines. The screenshots are presented in a user interface constructed with Sapien's free PrimalForms. The PowerShell code is still rough and can be improved dramatically.

 

 

Rob Mokkink released an updated version of the Resource Pool Reservation Script. This script is based on my Resource Pool Calculator. He modified it quite a bit. It now has logging, can be run as a scheduled task, % of resource reservation for memory and CPU that can be set on a resource pool. The script respects the reservation set on a particular VM.

The 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.