Steve Jin, author of the VMware VI and vSphere SDK: Managing the VMware Infrastructure and vSphere book, recently started his DoubleCloud blog. In a short time span he produced several high quality posts which should be a must-read for every SDK user.
In his latest post, Top 10 Best Practices Using VMware VI and vSphere SDK (part 1), Steve gives invaluable advice for working with the SDK.
Since most of the SDK samples are (still) in Java, and since I know there are quite a few SDK users coming from the PowerCLI world, I decided to write up on some of Steve’s best practices for PowerCLI users.
And I hope Steve doesn’t mind 
Update: I thought it would make it easier for the reader to group all the SDK best practices and tips & tricks together. So I created a dedicated page, see SDK.
Another post in the dvSwitch series. This time I’ll tackle the creation and use of a private VLANs (PVLAN) on a dvSwitch.
For those that are not that familiar with PVLANs have a look at KB1010691, that article gives a good overview of the PVLAN concept. And there were several sessions during the last VMworld that talked about PVLANs. The most noteworthy being TA2525 VMware vSphere 4 Networking Deep Dive.
In short, PVLANs allows isolation for guests on a shared IP subnet.
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Yesterday, Cody published on his Professional VMware blog an excellent article, called vSphere Host Died Abandon Ship! – vSphere vCenter Alarms & Actions.
The article shows a very elegant solution how to move your guests to “safer havens”, the moment one of the hosts in the cluster starts experiencing hardware problems.
The elegance of Cody’s solution is that he uses maintenance mode to force vMotion on all the powered-on guests on the host that experiences HW problems.
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In a previous post in this series (see PowerCLI & vSphere statistics – Part 2 – Come together), I showed the usefulness of the Group-Object cmdlet when working with statistical data. The script in that post grouped data samples for each hour together, which made it much easier to calculate the hourly average. With the Group-Object cmdlet you avoid numerous nested if- or switch-statements.
And best of all, you don’t have to code the grouping yourself, it was all done for you by the PowerShell Team.
So make sure this cmdlet belongs to your basic PowerShell repertoire. It will prove invaluable when processing statistical data.
This post will show you several of the different options you have to group statistical data together. And I will illustrate each of these with a sample script.
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An interesting question on Alarms arrived in my mailbox recently. Charlie wanted to know if it was possible to add an action to a selected set of the alarms he has defined in his vCenter.
The current PowerCLI build (version 4 update 1 – build 208462) unfortunately has no cmdlets to work with alarms. There are some alarm-related cmdlets available in the VI Toolkit for Windows Community Extensions. But none of these provides the functionality Charlie wanted to have.
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In PowerCLI & vSphere statistics – Part 1 – The basics I briefly mentioned instances. In this post I’ll go a bit deeper into that subject.
And to demonstrate it all I will use part of the esxtop post on Yellow Bricks. In that post Duncan compiled, from various sources, a number of “common sense” thresholds that you can use in esxtop to show you possible problems with your hosts and/or guests.
Since I’m not sitting 24/7 behind an ESX/ESXi console, I looked for a way to let PowerCLI/PowerShell do that for me
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An interesting question came up in the PowerCLI Community recently. Jason wanted to use a script from another thread where you could connect a NIC to a specific portgroup while cloning a new guest from a template.
The script didn’t work when the requested portgroup was on a dvSwitch. Enough of a reason for me to have another look.
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The end of my previous post in this series, see PowerCLI & vSphere statistics – Part 1 – The basics, showed how you could get the statistical values for a specific day.
Depending on the point in time for which you request the values, the sampling interval will be different. For example Historical Interval 2 will return values measured over 30 minute intervals. See also the schematic I included in the previous post.
This sample interval is not always what you want for your reports. Suppose you want to always report hourly values and only for working hours during business days. This post will show you how to accomplish that.
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