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Get complete vCenter session info

There was an interesting thread in the PowerCLI Community today. It raised the question how one could report on the current vCenter sessions, including the IP address or hostname from where the session was started.

Unfortunately the SessionManager doesn’t hold any information from where the session was started.

But there are other ways of finding that information. The UserLoginSessionEvent object has a property, called ipAddress, that has the information we’re after.

Btw if you are only interested in looking for idle sessions, independent from which host they were started, there is a great post, called List and Disconnect vCenter Sessions on the PowerCLI blog.

Update May 4th 2012: function updated to handle multiple vCenter connections.
Continue reading Get complete vCenter session info →

Change the root password in hosts and Host Profiles

For good security measures you should change the password of your root account on your ESX(i) servers on a regular basis. Instead of logging on to each and everyone of your ESX(I) servers, you can easily automate this process.

But what about the new ESX(i) hosts you will roll out in between root password changes and where you use a Host Profile to configure these new ESX(i) hosts ? Will you need to run a script after the deployment to change the root password ?

Turns out that you can easily update  the root password in your Host Profile with the help of an SDK method.

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Will Invoke-VMScript work ?

The Invoke-VMScript cmdlet can be a very useful cmdlet, but sometimes it will fail against one or more of your VMs. And it is not always immediately clear why the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet will not work against that specific VM.
The cmdlet help contains a number of prerequisites, but how do you verify if all the prerequisites are fulfilled?
I decided to create a function that would verify the prerequisites, and that would, if requested, which of the prerequisites was missing.

Continue reading Will Invoke-VMScript work ? →

vSphere 5 Top 10 – VMFS5

Continuing my Dutch VMUG Event 2011 presentation series with a post on the VMFS5 feature. This feature clocked in at position 8 in the Top 10.

With VMFS5 comes a bunch of new features. Just to name a few:

  • 64TB VMFS Volumes in 1 extent
  • 64TB physical RDM
  • Unified block size of 1MB
  • Support for more files (> 100000)

For a complete list of the features that VMFS5 introduces, have a look at Cormac‘s post, called vSphere 5.0 Storage Features Part 1 – VMFS-5.

Continue reading vSphere 5 Top 10 – VMFS5 →

vSphere 5 Top 10 – NetIOC

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.

Continue reading vSphere 5 Top 10 – NetIOC →

vSphere 5 Top 10 – vMotion

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  😉

Continue reading vSphere 5 Top 10 – vMotion →

vSphere 5 Top 10 – HA

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.

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vSphere 5 Top 10 – Storage DRS

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.

Continue reading vSphere 5 Top 10 – Storage DRS →

LUN juggling in vSphere 5

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.

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Storage Views – Datastores

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.

Continue reading Storage Views – Datastores →