Ok, I have been living under a rock a little recently, I have had so much going on that my blog and my hands on time has been suffering, sorry for that.
Whilst delivering a presentation on the new features in vSphere 4.1 – Of which there are tons (should have been 4.5 in my opinion), I came across the ability to be able to enable SSH from the DCUI (Direct Console User Interface).
And last in this series of presentations given in London on the 8th October but by no means least is Advanced performance troubleshooting using esxtop, this was an absolutely fantastic presentation by a guy who blew my mind, the best bit was when someone asked him a question and he told the audience member where to find the information on the system and how to decode it from the hex file it was written in – A serious Guru !
Unfortunately there was an issue getting the audio of this session so it looks like we will have to stick with the slide deck but please do not be disappointed as this is 59 deep dive slides on esxtop including some of the new counters only relevant to 4.1, please check it out its great stuff.
Following on in the series of presentations (listed below) given by VMware on the 8th October in London please find below the PowerCLI & Onyx slide deck and MP3 file.
Other presentations given:
This presentation focused on PowerCLI and Onyx, they skipped some of the easy stuff that normally goes at the start of a PowerCLI deck mainly because the London crowd is used to me force feeding them PowerCLI on a regular basis !
Its a great deck and a good listen on the MP3, some interesting questions and comments made throughout the deck.
This presentation was given by Vladimir Goranov and Yavor Boychev who are both part of the PowerCLI team. (See if you can spot the mistake on slide 7 
)
The MP3 file can be downloaded from here and the presentation is embedded below: Continue reading
Following my first post located here called ‘Exploring VMware APIs’ which was held on October 8th in London, I have now uploaded the second slide deck and MP3 file.
This time the presentation was on “vSphere APIs for Performance Monitoring”, there were some great tips in here on how to optimise your code and the presenter was fantastic, the kind of guy you could watch present about anything – very theatrical !
This presentation was given by Balaju Parimi and Ravi Soundararajan – make sure you listen to the MP3 which can be downloaded here.
On October 8th in London VMware arranged for some of the top GURUs to come to London and give some exclusive presentations on VMware API’s, performance, PowerCLI and Onyx.
It was a great day with around 60-70 attendees, luckily for those of you who didn’t attend we managed to record the session in MP3 format and also get hold of the presentations.
This is session 1 of the day and is entitled “Exploring VMware APIs” by Preetham Gopalaswamy, please make sure you download it and have a listen, there is some really great stuff in here.
Firstly, the below is a video shot on the day which explains more about what we were trying to achieve: Continue reading
If you are in London on the 8th October 2010 then you could be in for a treat, VMware are arranging a fantastic event, well worth the visit and best of all its free !
The event is called: Managing vSphere in large environments using APIs and PowerCLI
There are limited spaces available so act now or you will miss out, some of the most fantastic minds of VMware will be gracing London with their presence before heading out to VMworld Copenhagen.
Think of this as a taster of the kind of things you can expect from Technology Exchange, the contents are listed below, I would recommend this to any VMware admins who are managing large implementations of vCenter, there will be some great detail in these sessions.
If you would like to attend please send an email to PowerCLIEvent@virtu-al.net with your name and company, this will strictly be on a first come first serve basis as there are limited numbers.
If the API’s are not for you then make sure you read the last session before dismissing this day !
Its probably not news to you that VMware have now released View 4.5, just one of the many cool announcements made at VMworld 2010 – San Francisco.
Did you know however that View now has some PowerShell cmdlets ? – Yeah that’s right.
I think its great that VMware are putting so much time and effort into PowerShell and giving windows admins a great tool to manage their VMware infrastructure with, one thing I always tell anyone who will listen is that PowerShell is “the glue” that sits in between your applications to enable a common programmatic interface allowing you to glue all these applications together to give you the end results you need, whether it be deploying a VM and then installing Windows and then installing Exchange and then following on to add the mailboxes and patch the server and even send you an email at the end to say its done or simply just adding an “A host” record to a DNS server for a VMHost after installing ESX and patching the host using the Update manager cmdlets.
The possibilities are endless, well as endless as your imagination !
So yes, the point here is that its a great thing that VMware continue to add PowerShell enablement to their apps giving us the freedom to automate them.
With View 4.5 we are given 45 cmdlets to manage our View environment, these are listed below: Continue reading
Recently released on the PowerCLI site there has been an updated version of the PowerCLI Poster, this time the PowerCLI Documentation and Engineering teams have done a great job of updating it into a readable poster and have even added my quick reference guide to it to make it an awesome document.
Included in this poster you will not only find every cmdlet collated into some nice readable sections but also code examples and further PowerCLI and PowerShell resources, download the pdf from below:
A few times in PowerGUI or generally I have needed the user to select a single entity so that I can use this entity further in the code to narrow down the output, with this in mind i created a quick PrimalForms form which can be used as a function and a single object selected, the below code can be used within GUI apps like PowerGUI or vEcoShell or just from the powershell prompt.
For example if you wanted to select just the VMs from one host you could present the user a nice GUI with all the hosts added to the dropdown box with the following simple code:
# Send the Hosts to the GUI function Select-GUIObject "Host" (Get-VMHost) # Get the VMs for the selected host $SelObj | Get-VM | Out-GridView
So the GUI box presented from the Select-GUIObject would look like so:
Once the host was selected and the OK button was pressed the VMs would be returned in $selObj and a list of VMs can be gained as in the next line of code and the following output from Out-Gridview:
Other examples of this function can be used with Get-VM or Get-Datastore or whatever you like, this is one of the areas I have spoken to the people at Quest and I believe they may be making some improvements to PowerGUI & vEcoShell to make input easier.
The code: Continue reading
As we announced in our post “We’re writing a book!”, Luc and myself started writing a PowerCLI book.
At about the same time I got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join EMC as a vSpecialist, how could I turn that down !
Now you don’t become a vSpecialist for free, I have been spending a fair amount of time in training, coming up to speed with VCE (VMware/Cisco/EMC) and travelling all over the globe. The little time I did have spare was spent at home with my family.
As a consequence, our chapter-writing schedule failed miserably, something which I am ashamed of as Luc is doing a fantastic job.
And now, for the proverbial “silver lining”, have a look who agreed to help us out:
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 |
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| Glenn Sizemore
Winner of the Scripting Games 2010 and vExpert |
Jonathan Medd
Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP) |
Arnim van Lieshout
vExpert |
In other words, the book will be now be written by “4 vExperts and a MVP” !
Can’t wait to read it 😉