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Get the vMotion/svMotion history

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.

motion-reports

Update October 29th 2013: added additional parameters to the Get-VIEventPlus function

  • User: one or more users for which to return the events
  • System: a switch to return all system user events
  • ScheduledTask: return all events for a specific Scheduled Task

Update February 10th 2014: it’s always nice to see another implementation based on one of your scripts. The Opvizor solution will soon contain this function, see Dennis Zimmer‘s post called Storage vMotion Activities Report ! Continue reading Get the vMotion/svMotion history →

Automate your SDRS Anti-Affinity rules

One of the hot new features in vSphere 5 was the introduction of SDRS. And with SDRS came the concept of affinity rules for VMs and VMDKs. Cormac, aka @VMwareStorage, posted a nice overview of the SDRS affinity rules in Storage DRS Affinity & Anti-Affinity Rules.

choice and directions signs

Since then several posts have appeared on the subject of SDRS affinity rules.  To list just a few:

Currently there are no PowerCLI cmdlets to define the inter- and intra-vm anti-affinity rules for SDRS. After a question in the VMTN PowerCLI Community I decided to write a function. This function will allow you to automate the creation of the SDRS anti-affinity rules.

Continue reading Automate your SDRS Anti-Affinity rules →

Test if the datastore can be unmounted

Lately I have been playing around with the new Storage related features in vSphere 5. One of the novelties is that you can now unmount a VMFS datastore and detach a SCSI LUN through the API.
To be able to unmount a datastore, some conditions have to be met. In the vSphere Client you get an informative popup that tells what is prohibiting the datastore unmount. If not all conditions are met, you can not continue with the unmount.

Nice feature, but what for those of us that want to automate this ?

Update October 28th 2012: Take into account that the datastorecluster is not connected to a host that is part of a cluster. Skip the HA heartbeat test.

Update April 23th 2012: Use the RetrieveDasAdvancedRuntimeInfo method to find the actual datastores that are used for the heartbeat.

Continue reading Test if the datastore can be unmounted →

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 →