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.
An interesting question arrived in my mailbox this morning. Robert wanted to know what was the most efficient way to create a new property, called lunID, for the objects returned by the Get-ScsiLun cmdlet.
The new property had to show the lunID, as it is returned in the LUN column in the vSphere client.
One of the demos we did in our VMworld 2010 US and Europe sessions, showed the use of the new Extensiondata property and of the new New-VIProperty cmdlet. Both features were introduced with PowerCLI 4.1. In my PowerCLI 4.1 brings the New-VIProperty cmdlet post I already showed the interesting possibilities this new cmdlet offers.
On my return from VMworld Europe there was a new thread in the PowerCLI Community that asked how one could get at the Runtime Name property as it is shown in the vSphere Client. The Get-ScsiLun and Get-ScsiLunPath cmdlets unfortunately do not return that property. So I guessed it was time to show once more the strength of the New-VIProperty cmdlet.
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.
