Ever wanted to check the hosts in your vCenter to make sure they are all the same type, you can use the following one liner to do this:

Get-VMHost | Sort Name | Get-View | Select Name, @{N=“CPU“;E={$_.Hardware.CpuPkg[0].Description}} | Export-Csv c:\cpuinfo.csv

Sample Output:

Or if you want to add the cluster name in there as well:

Get-VMHost | Sort Name | Get-View | Select Name, @{N=“Cluster“;E={Get-Cluster -VMHost (Get-VMHost $_.Name)}},@{N=“CPU“;E={$_.Hardware.CpuPkg[0].Description}} | Export-Csv c:\cpuinfo.csv

Sample Output:

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, I have been on vacation.  I thought I would ease myself back in with a quick one-liner.

We had an issue on one of our esx hosts today and when I went to check the logs I noticed the time was out, on further checking the server the NTP service had stopped.

I wrote a quick one liner to double check all our Hosts were using the same NTP Server and that the service was started:

Get-VMHost |Sort Name|Select Name, @{N=“NTPServer“;E={$_ |Get-VMHostNtpServer}}, @{N=“ServiceRunning“;E={(Get-VmHostService -VMHost $_ |Where-Object {$_.key-eq “ntpd“}).Running}}

This will give you a nice table letting you know the state of your hosts time, if you do happen to have a host with an incorrect NTP server then you can set it like this:

Add-VMHostNtpServer -VMHost MYHost -NtpServer ‘ntp.mydomain.com‘

Or if one of the services has stopped you can start it again with the following:

Get-VmHostService -VMHost MyHost | Where-Object {$_.key -eq “ntpd“} | Start-VMHostService

Example output from my one-liner:

This script will save you time and resources.

I have been using this script for the past month and it has highlighted a number of issues which would have been harder to find without it.

Daily Report does what it says on the tin, it runs as a scheduled task before you get into the office to present you with key information about your infrastructure in a nice easily readable format.

This script picks on the key areas of the virtual infrastructure and reports it all in one place so all you do in the morning is check your email.

One of they key things about this report is if there is no issue in a particular place you will not receive that section in the email, for example if there are no datastores with less than 5% free space (configurable) then the disk space section will not show in the email, this ensures that you have only the information you need in front of you when you get into the office.

So what areas does this script report on ?

Continue reading →

So, you have installed ESX on your nice pair of RAID 1 72GB or 146GB disks and have a whole bunch of disk space left over, what do you do with it, well if your anything like me you will format it as a VMFS partition and use it for storing Templates or temporary VMs that you dont care if they die.

But what if your not like me, what if your one of those admins who doesnt really know where they are storing their VM’s, they dont even care, they just click to order the storage by free space and put it on the one that has the most free space – even if it is local storage (come on, we all know them).

The following one-liner will list all the VMDK files for VMs stored on your local storage.

Please note:  The where clause assumes your local storage has the word local in it, this can obviously be changed or you can use a –nomatch to exclude your san storage if needs be.

Get-Datastore |where {$_.Name -match “local“} |Get-VM |Get-HardDisk |select Filename |Export-Csv c:\LocalVMs.csv

You can also add multiple names for your local storage by added them with a | between them in the match string (Thanks LucD) like the following:

Get-Datastore |where {$_.Name -match “store|local|storage“} |Get-VM |Get-HardDisk |select Filename |Export-Csv c:\LocalVMs.csv

There are a fair few PowerCLI scripts which can be run as scheduled tasks, some that email you or maybe a monitoring script but recently I have been asked how this can be done, what do you put in the Run line for the script to work properly.

There are two ways of doing this really:

1.  Add a line to a start of each of your scripts to make sure it loads the PowerCLI snapin, without which PowerShell will not recognise any of the PowerCLI cmdlets.

Continue reading →

A quick one-liner which gives you an outline of your Host hardware information:

Get-VMHost |Sort Name |Get-View |
Select Name,
@{N=“Type“;E={$_.Hardware.SystemInfo.Vendor+ “ “ + $_.Hardware.SystemInfo.Model}},
@{N=“CPU“;E={“PROC:“ + $_.Hardware.CpuInfo.NumCpuPackages + “ CORES:“ + $_.Hardware.CpuInfo.NumCpuCores + “ MHZ: “ + [math]::round($_.Hardware.CpuInfo.Hz / 1000000, 0)}},
@{N=“MEM“;E={“” + [math]::round($_.Hardware.MemorySize / 1GB, 0) + “ GB“}} | Export-Csv c:\hostinfo.csv

Output Example:

A few one-liners inspired by the people who I follow on twitter, firstly Jason Boche was working on a script to reset CPU and Memory limits to “Unlimited” for all VMs in vCenter, I joked with him that this was a one liner, firstly we can set the memory limits with the following:

Get-VM | Get-VMResourceConfiguration | Where-Object {$_.MemLimitMB -ne ‘-1‘} | Set-VMResourceConfiguration -MemLimitMB $null

The –1 equates to an “Unlimited” setting.  This doesn’t address the CPU limits, this can be done using the following:

Get-VM | Get-VMResourceConfiguration | Where-Object {$_.CpuLimitMhz -ne ‘-1‘} | Set-VMResourceConfiguration -CPULimitMhz $null

Continue reading →

Ever wondered how your VM’s are doing ?  What resources are they using, do they have too many CPU’s or too much memory ?

This simple one-liner will give you a list of each of your vms, it will tell you how many cpu’s, the amount of memory, average cpu usage for x amount of days and the average memory usage for x amount of days, how cool is that ?!

Get-VM | Where {$_.PowerState -eq “PoweredOn”} | Select Name, Host, NumCpu, MemoryMB, @{N=”Cpu.UsageMhz.Average”;E={[Math]::Round((($_ |Get-Stat -Stat cpu.usagemhz.average -Start (Get-Date).AddHours(-24)-IntervalMins 5 -MaxSamples (12) |Measure-Object Value -Average).Average),2)}}, @{N=”Mem.Usage.Average”;E={[Math]::Round((($_ |Get-Stat -Stat mem.usage.average -Start (Get-Date).AddHours(-24)-IntervalMins 5 -MaxSamples (12) |Measure-Object Value -Average).Average),2)}} ` | Export-Csv c:\Temp\stats.csv

Update 03 July 2009: This has been updated as it was not collecting the average over the given timescales, the original code was selecting 1 sample from the timeframe.

Sample output: