Ever wondered how many VM’s you have on each Host? You could manually check it or then again you could let powershell do the work for you:

Get-VMHost | Select @{N=“Cluster“;E={Get-Cluster -VMHost $_}}, Name, @{N=“NumVM“;E={($_ | Get-VM).Count}} | Sort Cluster, Name | Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation c:\clu-host-numvm.csv

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Short security principles intro

One aspect of your vSphere environment that shouldn’t be ignored is the built-in security feature that allows you to control who can do what with which vSphere entity.

Internally this is controlled from the AuthorizationManager. This object contains all the properties and methods you need to configure and manage the built-in security system.

The principle how vSphere entities are protected is quite straightforward.

At the basis are the so-called privileges. Each privilege describes a basic action that can be performed on one or more of the vSphere entities.

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In Part1 of this article we had all the roles and permissions exported to an XML file. It’s now time to import the roles and permissions into a Virtual Center.

The script does in fact the reverse of what the script in Part 1 did.

But there were a few “gotchas“ that had to be solved before arriving at a working solution.

Duplicate Names

The script does not take into account that you can have different objects in your vSphere environment with the same name! Which imho is not a good practice in any case.

Should someone have the need for this functionality let me know and I will try to adapt the scripts.

Principals

The script does not create the principals that are mentioned in the XML file. If these principals do not exists in the environment where you want to import the roles and permissions the script will show errors.

Speed of execution

The permissions are set with an API called SetEntityPermissions.

As can be seen in the API Reference Guide this method requires a Managed Object Reference (MoRef) to a ManagedEntity. A ManagedEntity object is the parent object of most of the managed objects in vSphere.

This way of working avoids that there would have to be a separate method for each of the derived managed objects.

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Did you make the first Unofficial Online VMware User Group, well you sure missed a few things then, make sure you catch the video and sign up for the next one’s here

In the UOVMUG we were given an exclusive from Scott Herold of Quest who was giving a demo on the Virtualisation EcoShell, he showed us how you could produce highly customised great looking reports straight from the product, an enhanced version of vReport which is already available in the product.

He released this the next day on thevesi.org as an Action which can be downloaded and added to the existing version of the VES.

For step-by-step instructions on how to install this check out the article on the VES blog, for a preview of one of what you can do with the reports see below. Continue reading →

Ok, we all know what Storage VMotion is…

Enable live migration of virtual machine disk files across storage arrays. VMware Storage VMotion lets you relocate virtual machine disk files between and across shared storage locations while maintaining continuous service availability and complete transaction integrity.

VMware also give us some nice detail telling us how Storage VMotion works…

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