After my yadr – A vdisk reporter post I received an email from Dennis Zimmer, known from VMachine blog and as the IcomaSoft CTO. He pointed me to the yUML website and suggested that I could perhaps use part of the yadr script to produce an UML diagram.
As it happended there were already some PowerShell scripts that used the functionality offered by the yUML website to produce UML diagrams. Have a look for example at Use PowerShell and yUML to Create Diagrams by Doug Finke and Create Database Diagrams with Powershell + yUML by Chad Miller.
As you probably guessed by now I was sold to the idea.
I know there are already numerous scripts to report on virtual hard disks and most of them without a doubt much better then what I came up with for this post.
The reason I started with this script was a question in the PowerCLI Community from Alan in his Thin Provisioned Disks post. He wanted to know if you could get the provisioned and the allocated disk size for a thin provisioned virtual disk.
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As most of you should know VMware is organising a scripting contest, called Script-O-Mania. For those of you that haven’t submitted anything yet, hurry up. The closing date is tomorrow (March 15th 2010).
After some reflection I decided to go for a performance monitoring script. I wanted to have the vCenter client performance tab, without having to pay for the vCenter Agent license. And I wanted to offer some of the functionality that esxtop provided on the classic ESX systems.
That’s where my PSTop v1 script came to be.
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This post was triggered by the thread Retrieving ESX host hardware information in the PowerCLI community. In that thread at a certain point the NIC HW
information was missing. The solution was to use the classId, which is 0×0200 for NICs, as a filter on the HostPciDevice objects that are present under the pciDevice property in the HostHardwareInfo object.
That made me think that this would be an ideal way to list all the hardware present on a server. But to my surprise a lot of the entries are listed as “unknown”. Since the vendorId and the deviceId are known I knew that this could be improved.
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Today there was quite a bit of activity on Twitter following Jason Boche‘s blog post titled VMware Update Manager Becomes Self-Aware.
The problem Jason discovered was that the VUM skipped the guests which are hosting the VUM server and the vCenter server. As a consequence you can not select a cluster, select “remediate” and go out for lunch anymore. The resolution was a rather cumbersome and error prone manual procedure.
But of course PowerCLI can help the human vSphere administrator 
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One of the feature requests that came up in several emails I received for my dvSwitch series, was how to get and set the network adapters of virtual guests. In the current PowerCLI version the Get-NetworkAdapter and Set-NetworkAdapter cmdlets can not handle portgroups on dvSwitches.
That is why I created the following two functions, called Get-dvSwNetworkAdapter and Set-dvSwNetworkAdapter.
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