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.
During our presentation at the Dutch VMUG Event 2011, Alan and myself showed how several entries of the Top 10 vSphere 5 Features session could be automated with the help of PowerCLI. In the session we showed several demos.
This post is the first in a series, that will publish and document most of the scripts we used for the demos.
On the first position in the Top 10 we have Storage DRS. This feature brings intelligent placement of VMs and storage load balancing based on space usage and IO metrics. See part 4, part 5 and part 6 in Cormac‘s excellent series on vSphere 5 Storage Features.
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.
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.
After the Cloud Infrastructure Launch Forum event from July 12th 2011, it seemed that the new licensing model attracted more blog posts and tweets than the 140 new features in vSphere 5.
As one could imagine, one of the most heard questions was, what will I need to pay in the new licensing model. As a pro-active measure, I decided to write a short script that would tell me what vRAM entitlement my current vSphere 4 licenses would offer me.
Update August 4th 2011 08:30: VMware updated the vRAM calculation specifications. See the VMware vSphere™ 5.0 Licensing, Pricing and Packaging White Paper.
Update July 13th 2011 14:45: Apparently you have a vRAM pool per license type. I updated the script.
Sometimes a solution to a problem is just staring you in the face.
While writing the PowerCLI book, I spent quite a bit of time on how to find which user acknowledged an alarm.
Today Eric “Scoop” Sloof launched the same question on Twitter. While I thought it was not possible, based on my past investigations, I decided to have a second look.
And of course now I found in a matter of minutes what had cost me fruitless hours before.
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.
Another interesting feature of a dvSwitch is the ability to use bidirectional traffic shaping. Besides the outbound traffic shaping that is available on regular virtual switches, with the dvSwitches we can also have inbound traffic shaping. The traffic shaping is defined with the three known, classical values: average bandwidth, peak and burst size.
Recently there were some threads in the PowerCLI Community that asked how to do this with PowerCLI. Time to add this to our repertoire of PowerCLI dvSwitch functions.
In our PowerCLI book we presented a Delete-Harddisk function in Chapter 7.
One of our readers asked if that function could be used to remove orphaned VMDK files from one or more datastores. Now unfortunately that is not the case since the function we presented in chapter 7 uses the ReconfigVM_Task method to remove the harddisk.
In the PowerCLI Community there are some thread that provide scripts to report on orphaned VMDK files, but most of these are quite old.
So I decided to write a new script that would report on orphaned folders and VMDK files and that would have an option to remove these folders and files.
