Another post from our Dutch VMUG Event 2011 presentation. This time it’s about number 5 in the Top-10, Network I/O Control. This feature allows user-defined network resource pools and end-to-end QoS.
Note that this feature requires distributed Switches (dvSwitch). In fact I could have also written this post in my dvSwitch series with the title dvSwitch scripting – Part 10 – NetIOC.
Another post coming from our Dutch VMUG Event 2011 presentation. On position number 10, we find the vMotion Enhancements that were introduced with vSphere 5.
A single vMotion can now scale over multiple NICs. This feature can use a regular vSwitch or distributed vSwitch.On YouTube there are 2 videos, uploaded by VMwareKB, that show how to configure such a vMotion enabled multi-NIC vSwitch, regular and distributed.
Very useful videos, but as you can imagine, I wanted to automate this. No GUI clicking for me 
The second post originating from our presentation at the Dutch VMUG Event 2011 is about HA. vSphere High Availability appeared in the 2nd place of the vSphere 5 features Top 10. For the HA feature we showed how you could find out the FDM master and slaves in your cluster, and how to find the heartbeat datastore.
Buried in the massive amount of new features introduced with vSphere 5 there are several new API methods on the HostStorageSystem managed object.
Two of these API methods will allow you to automate the new Attach/Detach LUN feature from the vSphere Client. It concerns the AttachScsiLun and DetachScsiLun methods. Until this new feature is available natively in PowerCLI, you can use the following functions.
In the vCenter Client, since vSphere 4, you can find a Storage Views tab on several of the VI containers. The data in these Storage Views is collected and provided by the vCenter Storage Monitoring plug-in.
Have a look at David Davis‘s post, called Using VMware vSphere Storage Views, for more information on what you can do with the Storage Views.
Some time ago I got a question from Andrew how the Multipathing Status presented in the Storage Views could be detected and reported upon by a PowerCLI script. What looked rather simple at first, turned out to be a bit more difficult than I anticipated.
When you are dealing with big(ger) memory or storage values, it’s often not easy to present these in a human-readable format. I don’t know about you, but I find a number like 766509056 less readable, and meaningful, then 731 MB in a report.
You can introduce some nested If-Then-Else constructs in your scripts to do the conversion, but why repeat these in all your scripts ? That’s why I decided to write me a handy function, that would solve this problem once and for all.
Update November 14th 2011: handled passing a 0 to the Log function.
Last year’s sessions by Alan and myself definitely was one of the highlights of my year. And judging by the comments and scores we received, it didn’t go down that badly with the attendees either. So this year we want to “raise the bar”. We have some fantastic sessions planned and hope you will come and see some of the things we have organised.
If I had to use one word to describe our sessions this year it would be “Super”. After you have seen the sessions you will understand why.
So to give you an idea of what we have planned we decided to give you a quick outline of our sessions and also a mention some of the other PowerShell and PowerCLI based sessions at VMworld….
And don’t forget to register in time !
Judging from the number of hits, the VIProperties page seems to be rather popular.
The number of entries on that page increases nearly on a daily basis.And judging by the list of people who submitted New-VIProperty entries, this particular feature of PowerCLI is in use all over the place.
Recently my co-author of the PowerCLI book, Jonathan Medd, had a brilliant idea.
Why not bundle all the VIProperties in a module ? The user would just have to do an Import-Module, instead of a copy/paste on each of the entries.
So for the 100th post on my blog I decided to bring you the VIProperty module.
Update August 25th 2011: added the use of the PowerCLI 5 Get-VIProperty cmdlet.
This afternoon news of a new (and interesting) blog post from Julian Wood hit the Twitter-verse.
He took part from the logic of my Raiders of the Lost VMX script and used the relatively new VMFilePath parameter of the New-VM cmdlet, to shorten my script considerable. Well done, great job !
But I was intrigued by a remark in Julian’s post. He was obviously not too fond of using MoRefs in a script. But in Julian’s final script I still saw a Get-View cmdlet and the use of the HostDatastoreBrowser. Remembering a remark from one of my co-authors on the PowerCLI book, that the Get-View cmdlet would disappear, once the PowerCLI snapin would be sufficiently evolved, I decided to tackle Julian’s script and give it another simplification treatment and make it more PowerCLI 
An interesting question arrived in my mailbox this morning. Robert wanted to know what was the most efficient way to create a new property, called lunID, for the objects returned by the Get-ScsiLun cmdlet.
The new property had to show the lunID, as it is returned in the LUN column in the vSphere client.
