With the vSphere 5 licensing buzz from the past days and the incredibel number of hits on my Query vRAM post, I considered that a script to help you discover your memory overallocations might be useful.
The script uses the metric mem.usage.average to find out what amount of it’s allocated memory a guest is actually using. The script produces a report that will help you to determine which guests would be good candidates to lower their memory allocation.
In my previous posts in this series, I showed how you can use metrics to produce statistical reports.
One aspect of the metrics that we haven’t touched till now is the roll up types for metrics. If we look in the PerfCounterInfo object under the rollupType property, we discover that there are several of roll up types available. The enumeration lists the following: average, latest, minimum, maximum, none and summation.
What do all these types mean, and more importantly how do we handle these in our scripts ?
That is the subject of this episode in the statistics series.
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An interesting question came up in the PowerCLI Community. Can one extract the datastore statistics, that are used for the space utilization graphs in the vSphere Client, with PowerCLI ? The graph in question, which you find in the Datastores Inventory view under the Performance tab, looks something like this.
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It’s that time of the year again, you can now vote which sessions you would like to see at VMworld 2011.
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In an earlier post, see Hitchhiker’s Guide to Get-EsxTop – Part 1, I described my first experiences with the new Get-EsxTop cmdlet. While the use of the cmdlet is rather straightforward, the data it returns is not so easy to interprete. Luckily Carter intercepted a secret cable that allows us to actually use the data returned by the cmdlet.
The following is my first attempt to write a wrapper around the Get-EsxTop cmdlet. The idea is to have a script that produces statistical data similar to what resxtop produces.
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This post was triggered by a question in the PowerCLI Community around the ConfirmImpact attribute for PowerCLI cmdlets.
In PowerShell you can access the metadata of each cmdlet and extract quite a bit of useful information.
So I decided to have a look how I could use this cmdlet metadata to produce an alternative cmdlet reference for the PowerCLI cmdlets.
The list my script produces is NOT intended as a replacement for the excellent PowerCLI Reference. It is intended for those who already know what a PowerCLI cmdlet does but want to access parameter information quickly. It condences a lot of information in a spreadsheet.
I recently received an interesting question in my mailbox. Someone wanted to know if it was possible to enable/disable the logging for a Virtual Machine through PowerCLI. These Virtual Machine logs can be a handy resource when analysing problems.
This logging option is available through the vSphere client when you select Edit Settings and then Options-Advanced-General. In that form there is a checkbox that allows you to enable/disable the virtual machine logging.
Afaik, this feature is not yet available through a PowerCLI cmdlet. But it is easily accessible through the VirtualMachine object.
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What started of as a very hazy concept about a year ago, now became something very concrete.
Our PowerCLI book will be released from the Sybex warehouses on March 28th.
About a week later you should see it appearing in a store near you 
.
We set up a dedicated website at http://powerclibook.com.
For now that site is read-only, but we will open up the forum soon, so you will be able to leave comments and ask questions concerning the book.
Small hint, on that site you will also find a number of links to pre-order the book!
The PowerCLI Dev Team gave us an early XMas present yesterday. They released PowerCLI 4.1.1 build 332441 or PowerCLI 4.1 Update 1 as it is called in the Release Notes.
As usual there is a nice collection of new cmdlets and improvements on existing cmdlets in this new PowerCLI 4.1.1 build. Two of the new cmdlets that jump out for me are the Get-EsxCli and the Get-EsxTop cmdlets.
Although both cmdlets are still marked as ‘experimental’, they both open up a complete new area for automation. In this post I’ll have a closer look at the Get-EsxTop cmdlet and what you can do with it.
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