Category Archives: VMware

VMware Infrastructure PowerPack 2.1 for PowerGUI

Do you want to get some of the benefits of the VI Toolkit without the learning curve (even though its very easy to pickup)?

Well Kirk (Poshoholic) Munro has just updated the VMware Infrastructure PowerPack.  This is a great GUI way to access the power of the VI Toolkit and the skills of a Powershell Expert rolled into one smooth, easy to use application.

The VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack for PowerGUI has just been updated to version 2.1 adding lots of new features and improving the already brilliant features.  This PowerPack facilitates management and automation of VMware Infrastructure servers using the VMware VI Toolkit with PowerGUI’s expandable administrative console.

Version 2.1 of the VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack includes the following highlights:

  • Significant performance improvements when loading datacenters and clusters.
  • New top-level container nodes to facilitate viewing objects without having to browse into the Managed Hosts node.
  • Links allowing you to browse into log files from hosts.
  • Support for the VMware VI Toolkit 1.5 release.
  • VMotion support for virtual machines.

In addition to these changes, several links have been added and quite a few defects have been fixed.

You can learn more about this PowerPack, including version history and other details here. Great job Kirk and team.

Provison ESX Hosts through Powershell

The VI Toolkit community has been getting busier and busier of late, I think even LucD is taking 5 minutes to respond rather than his normal 2 minute answers!

There is one area of the VI Toolkit communities that I feel does not get enough publicity, there have been many scripts written by the community and members of VMware that are stored in the documents area of the community.

I will make it my aim to try and bring some of these fantastic scripts out into the open as the scripts and the people who wrote these scripts have done some amazing coding to help everyone else.

For example: NAEPS (Not Another ESX Provisioning Script) by SCampbell
Continue reading →

Next London VM User Group announced

The next Vmware user group has been announced in London to be held on Tuesday 10th March 2009.

I will be there so please come over and say Hi as I normally know no-one !

The details released are as follows….

The Steering Committee are pleased to announce the next UK London VMware User Group meeting (sponsorship pending :-), to be held on Tuesday 10th March 2009. We hope to see you at the meeting, and afterwards for a drink or two.Our meeting will be held at the Thames Suite, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 33 Queen Street, London EC4R 1AP, +44 (0)20 7248 4444. The nearest tube station is Mansion House, location information is available here.

PLEASE NOTE: As well as the date changing from the previously-published one, the day has also changed to Tuesday, and we’re in a different part of the venue from normal (out of the lift, turn right). Rest assured, the usual UG staples of great content and me banging on about Powershell will be present and correct.

Reception is from 1230 for a prompt 1pm start, to finish around 5pm. Our agenda for is not final at the moment, but looks something like this:

12:30 – 13:00 Arrive & Refreshments
13:00 – 13:15 Welcome & News
13:20 – 14:05 Sponsor Presentation – TBA
14:10 – 14:55 Presentation on real world Site Recovery Manager experience
15:00 – 15:20 Refreshments Break
15:25 – 16:00 Committee-moderated, user-generated content and discussion (some good stuff being lined up here)
16:05 – 16:45 VMworld Cannes debrief
16:45 – 17:00 Close
17:00 – Pub

Please feel free to contribute to the ‘UG content ideas’ forum thread running here. We won’t be able to incorporate all of the ideas for this coming meeting, but will do our best to include some of them.

To register your interest in attending, please reply with up to two named attendees from your organisation. If you do not receive a confirmation mail from us, please don’t just turn up since we will not be able to admit you to the meeting. Content from the meetings will continue to be uploaded to http://public.box.net/londonug, NDA permitting.

Sincerely, and with regards,

The UKLVMUG Steering Committee

vDiagram – VMGuru Style

Scott Herold (VMGuru) has done it again, he has a habit of taking my scripts and then improving them beyond reality.

I think next time I will be asking him to check it out before I release it on the public.

Firstly he has amended the VMware Twits script and created a really neat PowerGui action which you can import into the VMware PowerGui Power Pack and allows you an easy way to keep up to date with all the VMware related twitters, Check it out here

addvirtutwitter2

As if that wasn’t enough he has now made some AMAZING improvements to the vDiagram script showing off his new shapes and also advising of new plans for it within PowerGui, how amazing would that be to be able to right click on a cluster and say ‘vDiagram it’ or to be able to right click a PortGroup and draw all VM’s attached to it and its relations with vSwitches.

The new shapes are absolutely gorgeous, make sure you check out the VMGuru site to keep updated on some of the great things he has planned with the VI Toolkit and general VMware related updates.

Check his article out here

Thanks Scott (And no I am not French :))

vmguru_lab

vDiagram – Draw your VI with one script

Every good blog post should have some real life story to help you visualise why things happen so here goes:

The Story
One day whilst sat in the office updating the disaster recovery documentation I needed to document the Virtual Infrastructure, we all know that managers like pretty pictures so the first thing they asked for was a pretty diagram of how the infrastructure looked.
After dropping my 40th VM object on the page I started to get a bit bored, i looked at other options.  There is already a great tool on the market that performs this job, Veeam Reporter produces multiple documents and does a great job, but being a contractor I have a nil budget.  Knowing that you can do some very cool things with Powershell I wondered how easy it would be to hook into the Visio com object to get powershell to create the document for me.
As it turns out it wasn’t that hard, there were a few sticky moments where I had to refer to the Visio forums, and a great starting point by the only powershell reference using Visio I could find (Check out CommandBreak_ Thanks Joeseph) after explaining what powershell was to the guys in the Visio Forum and explaining why I was using powershell as I think this is the first time these people had heard of it, I started to relate some of there c# examples back into powershell.
The Result
The result is by no means a totally polished all singing all dancing documenter that documents your VI from the left, from the right and upside down but what it is, is an example of what you can do with the Visio COM objects and powershell combined.
I have not yet included all the options I would like, in future versions I would like to be able to document the networking setup / storage paths etc but I’m working on something else so wanted to get this script out into the public.
Instructions
You will need:
  • Powershell V1 (I haven’t tried it on V2 yet)
  • The VI Toolkit
  • Microsoft Visio (I have only tried 2003 +)
How to use:
  1. Download the zip file from the bottom of this page
  2. Once extracted copy the  ‘My-VI-Shapes.vss‘ file to your ‘My Documents\My Shapes’ folder.  If the folder does not exist create it and copy the file in.
  3. Run the powershell script with the following options:
To diagram the entire Infrastructure:
vDiagram.ps1 –VIServer MYVISERVER

To diagram a specific cluster use the following:
vDiagram.ps1 –VIServer MYVISERVER -Cluster “Production Cluster’

Example Output




The Download
This project has now moved to Github so please do add any changes you have back to the project for everyone to take advantage of here: https://github.com/alanrenouf/VisioPowerShell

VI3 Quick Reference Card


The guys over at vmrefernce.com have just updated there VI3 reference card, having used the last version many times and always keeping a copy on my desk I would check out the updated version and print off a few copies for you and your colleagues.

The new version contains all the updated information form ESX 3.5 Update 3 so go grab a copy from here now: http://www.vmreference.com/vi3-card/

Should I virtualise Exchange ?

For a long time the answer was no, but developments in the VMware Products have lead to major improvements in disk/network/memory and CPU performance so now the question is…
Where do I start ?
If your looking for a good starting point I would listen to the recent podcast from the VMware community round table which was specifically on virtualising Exchange..
Also you may want to check out the VMware pages written especially for virtualising Exchange, make sure you check out the resources tab….
It would seam that after years of advising against it even Microsoft are jumping on the band waggon:

With the release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a virtualized Exchange 2007 SP1 server is no longer restricted to the realm of the lab; it can be deployed in a production environment and receive full support from Microsoft. 

Check out the full article on the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog here

Reservations / Limits and Shares

Apparently when performing a Virtual Center upgrade from ‘2.5 Update 1’ to ‘Update 2’ caused some issues when someone on twitter upgraded, It gave some of the attached Virtual machines reservations and limits that did not exist before, this obviously caused a few problems, especially to the machines that had more memory allocated than was limited.
I was asked if there was a way to extract all the Limit/Reservation information from Virtual Center, the following script does just that, into a nice csv file which can be loaded into excel and sorted as needed…..
$Filename = "C:\MyInformation.csv"
Connect-VIServer MYSERVER
$myCol = @()
Foreach ($VM in (Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine |Sort Name)){
	$MYInfo = "" |select-Object VMName,CPUReservation,CPULimit,CPUShares,MEMSize,MEMReservation,MEMLimit,MEMShares
	$MYInfo.VMName = $VM.Name
	$MYInfo.CPUReservation = $VM.Config.CpuAllocation.Reservation
	If ($VM.Config.CpuAllocation.Limit-eq "-1"){
		$MYInfo.CPULimit = "Unlimited"}
	Else{
		$MYInfo.CPULimit = $VM.Config.CpuAllocation.Limit
	}
	$MYInfo.CPUShares = $VM.Config.CpuAllocation.Shares.Shares
	$MYInfo.MEMSize = $VM.Config.Hardware.MemoryMB
	$MYInfo.MEMReservation = $VM.Config.MemoryAllocation.Reservation
	If ($VM.Config.MemoryAllocation.Limit-eq "-1"){
		$MYInfo.MEMLimit = "Unlimited"}
	Else{
		$MYInfo.MEMLimit = $VM.Config.MemoryAllocation.Limit
	}
	$MYInfo.MEMShares = $VM.Config.MemoryAllocation.Shares.Shares
	$myCol += $MYInfo
}
$myCol |Export-csv -NoTypeInformation $Filename

Check Cluster Configurations

Hugo has been pushing out some nice scripts recently and his latest is a cracker…

This Powershell script generates an overview of any items that are not available to every ESX server in a VMware cluster. These items might prevent your vm’s being vmotioned by DRS or restarted by HA. Pretty serious business, I’d say!

The items involved are:
1. datastores
2. LUNs (important when using Raw Device Mappings)
3. port groups

The output is a nicely formatted HTML page showing not only which items are misconfigured, but also where the are available and where they are absent.

Download it here and check out his site for some more amazing scripts.

vExpert

As you will have probably seen from the other vBloggers out there VMware (should that now be vMware) have announced there version of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP).

Its called a vExpert and you can have your say as to who you think deserves this prestigious title here