In my previous post “Exploring the PowerCLI cmdlets – Get-NicTeamingpolicy” I showed you how to output some great looking information for vSwitches which detailed all the information we may ever need to know, so whilst on the same cmdlet lets look at PortGroups, these have the same type of settings and the same cmdlet also works against a PortGroup object, as before we can display this information with a single one liner… Continue reading
Category Archives: VMware
Boot from Paravirtualized SCSI Adapter
From vSphere U1, VMware now support booting from a Paravirtualized SCSI adapter, why would you want to do this ? Well why not, check out the VMware Performance Blog where VMware have tested this adapter and shared their results.
VMware were able to achieve 350,000 I/O operations per second on a single vSphere host (ESX 4.0) and 3 virtual machines. From their findings the VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter was able to achieve 12% more throughput with 18% less CPU cost compared to the LSI virtual adapter… Now you see why we should use it !
So in trying to test this the first thing I did was move one of my current virtual machines onto the adapter by clicking “edit settings” go to “SCSI controller 0” and click the change type button, from there you can select “VMware Paravirtual”. Continue reading
vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide is here
Its here, I’m an author, watch out JK Rowling !
Its been a while coming but the vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide is now available to buy on Amazon (US), we are working at getting it on the UK site but I’m just pleased to see it out there and available to buy.
This book is a co-authored publication bought to you from some of the leading names in VMware bloggers and admins, and they also asked me to contribute too 🙂
The book is designed for you to carry around with you, its not a heavy duty full novel but more of a VMware admins help book which can be referred to when you are in the damp dark datacenter at 4am in the morning with no internet connection !
Having said that there is definitely something in there for everyone, whether you are new to VMware or a seasoned Pro.
Throughout the book you will find great tips, real life situations and numerous PowerCLI examples.
If you haven’t yet heard of this book then please read these wonderful comments already left on the Amazon post.
If you have read it then please, leave your comments along with the others.
VMware Converter – VMXNET3 Issue
How do you move your VMs from one vCenter to another ?
Today whilst moving a few VMs from my test vCenter server to my Non Production vCenter server I hit upon an issue with VMware converter, this is just a warning so you do not have the same issue.
I used VMware Converter (Latest version at this time: 4.0.1 build-161434) to move the VMs, as I have a thousand times before, but the machines in question was actually a Hardware Version 7 VM with a VMXNET3 network adapter, moving from ESX4 U1 to ESX 4U1. I have to say VMware Converter really is a great tool, I use it for many tasks from growing disks to P2Vs and the fact it is free is fantastic.
When going through the wizard Converter clearly found the VM as Hardware Version 7 as seen below… Continue reading
PowerCLI to SQL Databases
One of the things I love about PowerShell is how versatile it is, its a wonderful framework which can slot pieces of a puzzle together to create a masterpiece, Now I know it exists I can see every day uses and needs for PowerShell, it fits into every nuck and cranny.
Take for example my SnapReminder script, the fact that you can pull VMware Information from your vCenter, then run the results by Active Directory and finally push it through an SMTP server to complete the final piece of the puzzle astounds me, the only limit to PowerShell is your imagination.
The other day I was watching Twitter when someone asked how to do a particular task, they wanted to pull information from the VMware Infrastructure and update some existing data in an SQL database, I watched as multiple answers were given to this person…. do a database synchronisation…..buy this third party tool…..you cant do that…..extract it as a csv, convert it to xml, import it into here, spin around three times and say alacasam !
My instant answer was of course PowerShell (that seams to be my instant answer for most things of late). The reply was, can you access SQL with PowerShell then ? YES
I don’t think I personally have come across anything you couldn’t do in PowerShell given enough time and resources ! Lets talk through this scenario.
PowerCLI: Bring on the next version
In the previous version of PowerCLI we had 165 great cmdlets to play with and didn’t we have fun, now in the new version (Download Here) we have a whopping…..
That’s right, an extra 68 cmdlets (4 of the old cmdlets were renamed from the previous version), bring on the fun !
So as well as the increased performance, what do we now have to play with ? here is a quick summary of the new cmdlets and what they do…. Continue reading
Onyx – Why Learn PowerCLI ?
The PowerCLI Team yesterday published with the Onyx Project a great tool with lots of potential. The blogging community received Carter’s announcement enthousiastically (see my previous post The Onyx has landed).
As a casual PowerCLI user you might think, the product has a strange name but it is the answer to all my scripting and automation needs. Why should I bother learning all these PowerCLI cmdlets while this tools produces working code. But think again !
A word of warning by the Surgeon General, or Alan and Luc in this case 😉
Continue reading
The Onyx has landed
A couple of months ago Carter Shanklin (Product Manager of Automating the World) teased us all with a wonderful application which creates PowerCLI scripts for you by tracing your actions in the vCenter Client.
The scripts it produces are not PowerCLI perfect but they do produce a raw format of a script which can be used to find the awkward bits of the API that are hidden in the back of the API documentation. The true power in PowerCLI will still be the manipulation of the cmdlets.
VESI & PowerGUI PowerPack V2
As the official download count for V1 of my PowerPack has now hit over 1000 downaloads (I cant thank you all enough), I have now released V2 of my PowerPack for VESI and PowerGUI, this is more like the version I wanted to release first time around.
In the first PowerPack, I took a fair few snippets of code I had written on my blog and added these to the PowerPack to get people interested, now in Version 2 I have added even more content, more nodes, more actions and a fair bit of user requested features.
As you can see from the image on the left, there are a fair few nodes (so many I had to cut and paste the image together as they wouldn’t all fit in one screen capture).
There are also some new actions (see screenshots below).
If you have ESXi hosts you should find this useful, now you will be able to download the current firmware state to your windows machine with the click of a button, deploy it back and also reset them back to default configuration (seen below).
I was also requested to add the vCheck script into this version so you could run ad-hoc reports on customer sites, you will find this under the General tab.
You will also find many more VM nodes, most of which where inspired by Armin van Lieshout who was a great help during the testing phase and even sent through his own code for me to include. Thanks Armin.
Thanks to the other beta testers who sent me some great feedback (most of which is in here), I couldn’t have done it without you guys ! I also want to thank Kirk Munro who helped me out with a few coding or should I say User errors in V1 of this PowerPack 😉
vCheck Hypervisor style
The thing I love about adding my work to my site is that some people pick up what I have created and expand on it, I like to think that’s a sign of firstly my scripts being interesting enough to expand and secondly my scripts being so well written that anyone can pick them up and tailor them to their needs.
Following the initial additions that were added to v3 of vCheck, Raphael from http://www.hypervisor.fr/ has expanded my script somewhat further to include even more amazing functionality.
He has added the following areas of reporting:
- Host Ballooning
- Datastore Over Allocation
- Snapshot Oversize
- VCB garbage
- VMkernel warning check for ESX/ESXi (with deduplication)
- invalid or inaccessible VM
- Inapshot add/remove summary
- Time build
- NTP (service only) check
I will certainly make sure these are included in V4 with multiple other entries but in the meantime if you would like to download his excellent version then please check out his site, the posts are in French but he is nice enough to keep the script pure English 😉 Continue reading