Today I had a colleague come to me and say someone had deleted his VM, he didn’t know when and thinks it may have been a couple of months ago, he didn’t know which host or which datastore it was in. could I tell him when and who. Hmmmm, time to start trawling through the logs I thought.

A quick Twit from @stahler told me that this would be in the Virtual Center Database so, here is a quick powershell which I used to find the culprit…

# Fill in the following information:
$SqlServer = "MYDBSERVER";
$SqlDB = "VMwareDataBase";
$MYVM = "TESTSERVER1"
$TypeofEvent = "vim.event.VmRemovedEvent"
# The vim.event.VmRemovedEvent is a Removed action from VC you can also use :
# vim.event.VmGuestShutdownEvent
# vim.event.VmPoweredOffEvent
# vim.event.VmConnectedEvent

Function Read-VIDB ($SqlQuery)
{
# Setup SQL Connection
$SqlConnection = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection
$SqlConnection.ConnectionString = "Server = $SqlServer; Database = $SqlDB; Integrated Security = True"

# Setup SQL Command
$SqlCmd = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand
$SqlCmd.CommandText = $SqlQuery
$SqlCmd.Connection = $SqlConnection

# Setup .NET SQLAdapter to execute and fill .NET Dataset
$SqlAdapter = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataAdapter
$SqlAdapter.SelectCommand = $SqlCmd
$DataSet = New-Object System.Data.DataSet

#Execute and Get Row Count
$nRecs = $SqlAdapter.Fill($DataSet)

if ($nRecs -gt 0)
{
# Do Stuff
$dataSet.Tables | Select-Object -Expand Rows
}
}

$SqlQuery = "SELECT CREATE_TIME, USERNAME, VM_NAME, HOST_NAME, EVENT_TYPE FROM VMWareDS.VPX_EVENT WHERE (VM_NAME = N'$MYVM') AND (EVENT_TYPE = '$TypeofEvent')"
$MyResults = Read-VIDB $SqlQuery
$MyResults

Inspired by Gabe over at GabesVirtual World (Check out his site he has some great posts) I have added the Cisco Discovery Protocol info, its not the nicest looking output but the info is there !

Extracts all info for each ESX host into a text file, don’t forget to change the VI server you are connecting to and the path on lines 1 and 2 of the following script:

Connect-VIServer MYVISERVER
$filename = "c:\VirtualNetworkConfig.txt"
$vmhosts = Get-VMHost | Where-Object {$_.State -eq "Connected"} | Get-View
Write-output (Get-Date) | out-file -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
foreach ($vmhost in $vmhosts)
{
  $networkSystem = Get-view $vmhost.ConfigManager.NetworkSystem
  Write-output $vmhost.Name | out-file -Append -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
  foreach($netSys in $networkSystem)
  {
      foreach($pnic in $netSys.NetworkConfig.Pnic)
      {
          $subnets = $netSys.QueryNetworkHint($pnic.Device)
          foreach($pnicHint in $subnets)
          {
              Write-Output $pnicHint.Device | out-file -Append -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
              foreach($pnicIpHint in $pnicHint.Subnet)
              {
                  $info = $hint.connectedSwitchPort | Select *
                  $moreinfo = $hint.connectedSwitchPort.deviceCapability
                  Write-Output $info | Select * | out-file -Append -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
                  Write-Output $moreinfo | Select * | out-file -Append -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
                  Write-Output "Observed IPRanges: " $pnicIpHint.IpSubnet | out-file -Append -encoding ASCII -filepath $Filename
              }
          }
      }
  }
}

So you have used VMWare Virtual Infrastructure 3, you know how powerful it is and how great the features are within the VI client but what happens when you want to get more details or you want to automate some features… You wait for the next version and hope they have included them in there – WRONG !

You wait till early next year and you buy “Managing VMWare Infrastructure with PowerShell“ written by Hal Rottenberg and published by SAPIEN Press.

I have just finished technically reviewing this great book, if you haven’t bothered learning PowerShell yet (why not) and you haven’t looked at the VI Toolkit then please do yourself a favour and buy this book when it is released.

Not only does it give you an amazing insight into the way things work below the GUI it also teaches you the basics of PowerShell and how to use this technology to manage the VMware feature set we have come to know and love.

Hal’s unique writing style will take you through learning how to perform many extensive tasks which would normally take hours, sometimes days through the client and show you how to perform these actions within minutes or sometimes seconds. He even adds a little of his own sense of humour to lighten some of the more mundane tasks.

Learn how to deploy multiple virtual machines in minutes, report on the extensive areas of virtual infrastructure and much much more.

Believe me, this is one book I would recommend for any VI Admin to read and store net to your management workstation.

If you are a VI admin reading this then stop doing things the long way and get a bit of Posh in your life.

Recently I needed to check a whole bunch of servers to see if we had a particular VLAN tagged on any of the ESX Hosts, after a quick post on the VI Toolkit forum and a little messing, the following script tells me quickly which observed IP ranges are on each of the nics in each of the hosts…

Connect-VIServer MYVISERVER
$vmhosts = Get-VMHost | Get-View
foreach ($vmhost in $vmhosts)
{
   $networkSystem = Get-view $vmhost.ConfigManager.NetworkSystem
   Write-Host $vmhost.Name -foregroundcolor yellow
   foreach($netSys in $networkSystem)
   {
       foreach($pnic in $netSys.NetworkConfig.Pnic)
       {
           $subnets = $netSys.QueryNetworkHint($pnic.Device)
           foreach($pnicHint in $subnets)
           {
               Write-Host $pnicHint.Device
               foreach($pnicIpHint in $pnicHint.Subnet)
               {
                   Write-Host "`t" $pnicIpHint.IpSubnet
               }
           }
       }
   }
}

I had an issue with one of my hosts this week who’s nic had auto-negotiated to the wrong speed, following this I wrote a quick script to check the rest of my hosts.

Good job as there were a fair few nics running at 100MB rather than 1GB causing a few issues.

The following script will list each host and there nics and speeds….

Connect-VIServer MYVISERVER

$VMhosts = Get-VMHost | Get-View
Foreach ($vmhost in $vmhosts){
	Write-Output $vmhost.Name
	$pnic = 0
	Do {    
		$Speed = $VMhost.Config.Network.Pnic[$pnic].LinkSpeed.SpeedMb    
		Write "Pnic$pnic $Speed"    
		$pnic ++
	} Until ($pnic -eq ($VMhost.Config.Network.Pnic.Length))}

I needed to double check the CPU Affinity settings I had set on some VM’s which I wanted tied to the cores in my host, just to double check I had these correct the following one liner works a treat….

Get-Cluster “My Cluster” | Get-VM | Get-View | foreach {Write-output $_.Name $_.Config.CpuAffinity.AffinitySet}