Author Archives: Alan

About Alan

Alan Renouf has a role of Automation Frameworks Product Manager at VMware responsible for providing the architects and operators of the cloud infrastructure with the toolkits/frameworks and command-line interfaces they require to build a fully automated software-defined datacenter. Alan is a frequent blogger at http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell and has a personal blog at https://virtu-al.net. You can follow Alan on twitter as @alanrenouf.

vCloud Director 1.0 PowerShell Advanced Functions

Its no secret that VMware are working on vCloud Director (vCD) cmdlets, they recently surveyed the PowerShell and VMware community to make sure they had all the information needed to make this as much of a success as the vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets.

But did you know you can already use PowerShell with vCD ?  It should be no surprise to anyone who uses PowerShell to know that PowerShell does a great job with XML manipulation and API calls.

As part of vCD 1.0 there was obviously an API, this was based on REST which is essentially calls to web pages and sending/receiving data, so with the knowledge that this API is available and that PowerShell is a great way to communicate with this API all that was left was for someone to tie all this together and create some advanced functions which can be used against the vCloud API…. enter Jake Robinson.

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Jake has been doing some great work recently, personally I have spoken to him a couple of times and had the privilege of meeting him at VMworld 2011 Las Vegas, he is a great guy and very knowledgeable about both PowerShell and vCD so the perfect guy to create some advanced functions.

The functions can be downloaded from here:

Download: https://github.com/jakerobinson/vCloud-Powershell

I would also recommend checking out his great video on what he has created and some examples of how these can be used published here on his blog (add to your RSS feed) and also embedded below. Continue reading →

PowerCLI for vCloud Director–Have your say !

VMware have recently announced a survey on the PowerCLI site, this has been setup timageo poll people for what they think would be the best way to introduce cmdlets for vCloud Director, personally I think it’s a great move and proves that VMware really does listen to their customers opinions.

Their questions not only ask how you would like the vCloud cmdlets distributed but also if you would prefer common objects like VMs and Users to be new cmdlets based towards vCloud director or to add these as additional parameters to the existing cmdlets.

Personally when answering these questions I have to remind myself of a few things and ask myself a few questions:

  • vCloud Org users or tenants are going to be interested in different things than a vSphere admin, for example, does a tenant care about the details of the datastore so long as they are getting what they paid for, do they care about things like what host the VM or even what vCenter the VM is hosted in ? With this in mind do they really want to see the full set of “vSphere Properties” for an object or would a new set of properties based on the cloud information be relevant, similar with the cmdlets, do they want to see all the vSphere cmdlets or would a more specific set of cmdlets be better ?
  • Will vCloud Admins want to connect to both the vCloud and the vCenter at the same time ?  How will this work, when connected to both what would they expect to be displayed when running Get-VM? vSphere VMs, vCloud VMs both ? How would the properties be displayed ?
  • Will vCloud admins want to take a cloud VM and perform vSphere actions against the VM ?

Continue reading →

PowerCLI @ VMworld 2011

I have to say, 2011 I think was my best VMworld yet – probably because I now work for VMware and was involved in so much cool stuff but hey – it was Awesome !

Whilst at VMworld I notice a lot of activity on the PowerCLI front, to capture this rather than a normal blog post I wanted to share with you a short video I created, it not only shows you what happened at VMworld but also gives you some great detail on what people are using PowerCLI for.

Thanks to everyone I spoke to and everyone I had a drink with.  Also a big special thanks to my co-presenter Luc Dekens (featured at the end of the video).

vSphere Distributed Switch PowerCLI cmdlets

For a long time now when presenting at VMworld or VMUGS I have asked the question – What would you like to see from PowerCLI next ?  The standard answer I get at most of these is vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) cmdlets !

Luc Dekens did a great job with his series of posts showing how you could create your own VDS advanced functions, these allow you to add the functions to your PowerCLI session and work with VDS, find them here and take a look, they are a great example of how you can expand PowerCLI to support areas not yet written.

So what’s new ?

VMware have now released some PowerCLI cmdlets as a fling which work with VDS and allow you to do most of the common VDS tasks in your vSphere environment.  Please note that this is a fling and therefore not officially supported by VMware.  Having said that we are definitely keen for you to download these and try them out – please make sure you leave feedback as this will help with future versions !

Requirements

Currently there are some strict requirements around these cmdlets:

  • Windows required XP or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 is required  (Windows 7 and Vista are not supported currently)
  • VMware PowerCLI 4.1.1 or later is needed

Continue reading →

Auto Deploy and Image Builder profile functions

One of the best and one of my favorite ideas from the PowerCLI team (there are so many to choose from) was to include an initialization script when you launch PowerCLI, this gives us the nice black background, custom prompt and also other things like the Get-VICommand function.

Get-VICommand lists all the VMware related cmdlets added to your session, this is useful for quickly listing the VMware cmdlets you need, most people think this is actually a cmdlet which is part of PowerCLI but if you have ever imported the VMware snapin into a PowerShell session and tried to use Get-VICommand you will quickly realize this is not part of the cmdlet set.

Continue reading →

UKVMUG–Nov 3rd 2011

For the first time ever there will be a UK wide VMUG and I have to say the organisers have certainly made sure it will be one that is not to be forgotten.  With VMware super stars like Duncan Epping, Lee Dilworth and Cormac Hogan being flown in to give some great sessions and the usual UK crowd it should be a great event.

Also available throughout the day will be a PowerCLI Hands on Lab, come to learn how to get started with PowerCLI, take PowerCLI to the next level or even just to say hi and chat with me and Jonathan Medd about PowerShell, PowerCLI or anything else on your mind.

Event Details

Thursday, November 3, 2011

8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

National Motorcycle Museum
Coventry Road
Bickenhill, Solihull, West Mids, England B92 0EJ

Register

Make sure you register here
Continue reading →

PowerCLI-Man The Return

True to his word, PowerCLI-Man was back at VMworld Europe, luckily enough I managed to meet him this time too, for those who did not attend the full PowerCLI session you can watch the video below – One question remains though….

Who is PowerCLI-Man ?

North UK VMUG –11th Oct

image“Ayup me duck” – Sorry, just practising for next week.  For those of you in the north of the UK, if you aren’t already aware there is a “Virtual Machine User Group” next week on Tuesday 11th October.

Sessions will not only include VMware but Citrix, Microsoft, EMC, Netapp, B2Net and many many more – it should be fun !

I will be presenting a session on “Image Builder, Auto Deploy and general PowerCLI”, my session will be from 15:15 – 16:05 in the “Mull Room”.

If you are not yet registered to attend I suggest you head over to http://www.vmug.org.uk/ right now before they run out of room.

For more information on the day please see the below details and schedule of events:

Continue reading →

PowerCLI at VMworld Europe ‘11

I have just had a quick chat with my good friend PowerCLI-Man and he wanted me to let you know that despite rumours he will be attending VMworld Europe in Copenhagen 2011 – I for one am pleased about this and hope I will finally get the chance to meet him.

He said it was important to point out a couple of sessions to you which apparently will be fantastic:

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Continue reading →

Auto Deploy and vCloud Director

When re-installing my home lab I realized that when using Auto Deploy with vCloud Director (vCD) you would need to have an extra step in the planning process, this makes sense if you think about the way that Auto Deploy and vCD works.

vCloud Director installs an agent on the ESXi host which is used for deploying virtual machines and other operations, if you think about the way Auto Deploy works, any change that is made to the host which is not part of your initial Image Profile or set in your Host Profile will be removed if the host is rebooted, this includes the vCD Agent.

On installing the VCD agent I was presented with the following error:

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So  I did as advised and consulted the documentation and found the following:

Continue reading →