vSphere Archives - Page 2 of 12

vSphere Permission cleanup

Your vSphere environment is a living environment. Inventory objects are created and removed all the time. Together with these inventory objects there are often security permissions that come along. Team X needs Power User access for all VMs in folder Project-X. But the life-cycle management of these permissions is often not as fluent as your VM life cycle management. There is no built in permission cleanup method.

As a result, old permissions might be left behind, and what is worse, redundant permissions might be present. This doesn’t make the task of investigating “Who can do what?” in your vSphere environment any easier.

With the help of the function in this post you can now get rid of all these redundant permissions!

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vSphere Automation SDKs, PowerShell and you – Part 1

Yesterday a blog post, named Integration with VMware vSphere using the new Open Sourced Software Development Kits, was published. In my opinion an important milestone on VMware’s Open Source path ! The blog post announced the availability of the first two Open Sourced SDKs made available to the public on GitHub. One for REST and the other for Python.

When we hear REST API, we know it is relatively easy to consume these from a PowerShell script. So power up your labs and follow along on my first steps in my vSphere Audtomation SDK and PowerShell adventure.

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Upgrade an Appliance with OvfTools

Appliances are hot!

Each appliance, delivered as an OVA or OVF, can have one or more properties attached to it. These properties are mostly used to configure the appliance. In PowerCLI we have the Get-OvfConfiguration cmdlet. It returns the user configurable properties from an OVF or OVA file in a hash table.

But what about upgrading an appliance? Most, if not all, of the Ovf Properties are already entered for the older version of the appliance. Can’t we use that information to upgrade the appliance? And avoid having to retype all that information?

And to take away the suspense, of course, that can be done with a bit of PowerShell!

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ChatOps Bot

I do love integration, and especially when it is done in a new, innovative way.

My friend Dennis Zimmer, from Opvizor, recently gave me access to a preview of one of their new tools, which they called ChatOps Bot for VMware vSphere. It combines vSphere API calls with Slack API calls. Needless to say I liked the concept. And I can see many interesting possibilities.

Have a look.

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Orphaned Files Revisited

In my Orphaned files and folders – Spring cleaning post from way back, I provided a script to find orphaned VMDKs. This week there was a post in the VMTN PowerCLI Community that had a request to find all orphaned files. Time for a revisit of my old post!

I took my old script, massaged it a bit and gave it a more contemporary look and feel.
Just for info, the SearchDatastoreSubFolders method is relatively slow. So scanning a couple of datastores for orphaned files might take a bit of time. Be patient 🙂

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VMFS Datastores – Expand and Extend

We all know, and love, PowerCLI‘s New-Datastore and Set-Datastore cmdlets to create and manipulate VMFS datastores. But when we look at the functionality available through the Web Client, there is one interesting feature for manipulating VMFS datastores that is missing from the PowerCLI cmdlets. The Increase button, which allows us to Expand or Extend an existing VMFS datastore^*.

Recently there were a couple of threads on this subject in the VMTN PowerCLI Community, so I decided to streamline my quick-and-dirty scripts into something more presentable, and create a PowerShell module to bundle the functions. I present the VMFSIncrease module!
The VMFSIncrease module will also be my first contribution to the PowerCLI Community Repository! More on that further on in this post.

* _{The expand and extend functions for a VMFS datastore depend on the availability of free space on the VMFS datastore extents and/or the availability of free LUNs}

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vSphereDSC – VmwFolder

In this post I’ll introduce the first DSC resource from the vSphereDSC module, the VmwFolder resource. Since this is the first post in the series, I will also expand a bit on how the vSphereDSC module is set up and which conventions I’m using.

A vSphere Folder is a resource which can exist rather independently in an existing vSphere environment. You can easily create some test Folders to get the hang and feel of the vSphereDSC module and play with DSC Configurations based on this vSphereDSC resource.

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vSphereDSC – Intro

My attempts to marry DSC and vSphere have been going on for nearly a year* now. I showed some of my attempts and intermediate results at VMworld 2015, in two sessions at the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit and recently during a session at the 24th VMUGBE+. But now I’m finally going public with the vSphereDSC module.

Since WMF 5 has been made available in preview, and still is in RTM at the moment I’m writing this, there have been constant changes to the way I was writing the DSC resources for vSphere. Since the February 2016 WMF 5 release, I now have a (somewhat) stable, working class-based solution. At least, that is what my initial tests seem to indicate.

This intro for my vSphereDSC series, will lay out the playing field. I’ll explain the concept I’m using, show some of the issues I encountered and explain the layout of the vSphereDSC Resource module.

_{* “Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast”, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene III}

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vSphere Object by Path

In an older post, named Folder by Path, I provided a function to retrieve a Folder object by it’s path.

With the recent publication of my Get-InventoryPlus function, I can now get the path to all vSphere objects. So the obvious next step was to create a function, that would be able to use that information and retrieve any vSphere object by it’s path.

The function was first demonstrated during the 24th VMUGBe in Mechelen.

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Get-InventoryPlus – Inventory of all vSphere objects

Often I have to get a complete list of all the objects in a vSphere environment. From the PowerCLI cmdlets, the Get-Inventory cmdlets looks like the obvious candidate to tackle such a request. But the cmdlet seems to have some shortcomings. It definitely does not return all vSphere objects.

Hence I set out to write this Get-InventoryPlus function.

The function was demonstrated for the first time during the 24th VMUGBe in Mechelen.

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