Quite frequently there are questions in the VMTN PowerCLI Community for scripts that report on the tasks that ran in a vSphere environment.
The PowerCLI pssnapin provides a Get-Task cmdlet, but that only provides information about the recent tasks. An alternative is to use the Get-VIEvent cmdlet and extract all the TaskEvent entries.
But why not use the TaskHistoryCollector and it’s methods ? It provides many filtering options, and since this filtering is done in vSphere itself, this way of working is inherently much faster than using a filter in your script.
In analogy with the Get-VIEventPlus function, I published in my Get the vMotion/svMotion history post, here is the Get-TaskPlus function !
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The availability of vMotion and svMotion, provided you have a license that allows it, in vSphere are some of its key features.
The DRS and SDRS functionality will use vMotion and svMotion to better use the available resources.
And you as a vSphere administrator can use it to facilitate your work. Just think of how easy patching or datastorecluster maintenance becomes with the help of these two features.
But as an administrator you want to be able to report on what vMotion and svMotion have been doing over a specific time interval in your vSphere environment.
In the past I already provided a vMotion reporting tool in Events – Part 8 – vMotion history, but now it was time to provide a universal (s)vMotion reporting feature.
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Another post triggered by a question in the VMTN PowerCLI community. The user wanted to know how he could create a report that showed for which vSphere entities the alarm actions were disabled.
To set the stage, a short overview of what this is all about. In vSphere you can, since vSphere 4, disable and enable alarm actions for all the managed entities. This option is available from the vSphere client
and from the vSphere Web client.
But how to automate these actions, and more importantly in this case, how to report on the active settings ? Like always PowerCLI to the rescue.
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When you’re using ThinApp to package your software packages you are bound to end up with a huge repository after some time. Of course you have documented each ThinApp package you made, but sometimes you will need to produce a quick-and-dirty report. Then it’s handy to fire up a PowerShell script, instead of reading through all the packaging documentation.
With the help of the ThinApp SDK it’s quite easy to produce such a report.
When you are running multi-node vSphere clusters, you probably already had the experience that one or more of your LUNs were not visible on all nodes. Now you can try to find out which LUN is missing on which node the hard way through the vSphere client. Or you can use the force of PowerCLI and run a script that will report all this in a handy spreadsheet.
To make the script as flexible as possible it should be able to handle any n-node cluster. And as you some of you might know, the Export-CSV cmdlet has some problems with variable length rows. Luckily there is a handy solution I already used in my yadr – A vDisk reporter post.
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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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