One of the announcements during VMworld 2010 in San Francisco that perhaps got a bit obscured by the other “big” announcements, was the release of Onyx 2.0. For those of you that hadn’t heard of Project Onyx before, this nifty little tool captures all SOAP traffic that is passed between your vSphere client or PowerCLI session and the vCenter or ESX(i) server to which you are connected.
And that’s not all, the Onyx program will translate the captured SOAP traffic into PowerShell code. This allows you to see which vSphere APIs are used and how parameter objects for these methods are constructed.
On August 19th 2010 the long awaited ThinApp SDK became available.It allows you to programmatically interact with your ThinApp packages. The SDK package is foreseen to be used with Visual Studio, as can be deduced from the included merge module called ThinAppSDK.msm. The samples that come with the SDK unfortunately only show the use of the SDK with C++ and VBScript. But with a bit of fiddling it’s quite easy to use the APIs from your PowerShell environment.
This post will show you:
- how to set up the SDK for use from PowerShell
- some usage examples from PowerShell.
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In the new PowerCLI 4.1 build 264274 there are two new cmdlets, called New-VIProperty and Remove-VIProperty, that deserve your special attention.
The New-VIProperty cmdlet allows you to add a new properties to any PowerCLI object (InventoryItem, HostSystem, VirtualMachine…). And it’s up to you to define what the value of this new property will !
The Remove-VIProperty cmdlet allows you to remove such a new property.
These new cmdlets, combined with the new Extension property, will change several of the well established ways that you use in your PowerCLI scripts. And besides adding a lot of flexibility, the extension property will make your scripts considerably faster (if used wisely).
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I received an interesting comment on my Events – Part 7 : Working with extended events – Update Manager post from Suresh. He wanted to know if it was possible to create a similar report with the vCenter Update Manager PowerCLI cmdlets as you can get with the esxupdate query command.
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As I already mentioned in my previous post, Events – Part 6 : Working with extended events – Converter, another
add-on that produces extended events, is the Update Manager.
With the recent introduction of the vCenter Update Manager PowerCLI snapin, it is now fairly easy to automate all aspects of patch and update management in your vSphere environment. And with the help of the extended events produced by Update Manager, you can easily produce reports. This post shows one way of doing this.
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In a previous post, called Events, Dear Boy, Events – Part 2, I mentioned that some tools/add-ons use a special event type called ExtendedEvent. Two classic examples are the Converter and the Update Manager. If you want to compile a report for any these tools it’s important to understand what is available in the extended events they produce.
If you want to know if there are any other tools/add-ons in your vSphere environment that produce extended events, then you can use the first script from the Events, Dear Boy, Events – Part 2 post to get a complete list of all available extended events.
In this post I’ll show how to use the Converter extended events.
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Warning: this post has no “virtual” content !
This time I post a function that allows you to export your data to a “real” spreadsheet (XLS format) instead of a CSV file.
The reason for posting this function was a series of threads in the PowerCLI Community by Suresh. Over several threads he has been collecting scripts that create various reports on his vSphere environment. Ultimately he wanted to have a spreadsheet where each report would be stored on a worksheet.
PowerShell has the very handy Export-Csv cmdlet to create CSV files but afaik nothing for creating XLS files 
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Triggered by a recent post, see get-virtualportgroup, in the PowerCLI Community, I had a closer look at the Get-VirtualPortgroup cmdlet.
This cmdlet returns a VMware.VimAutomation.Types.Host.VirtualPortGroup object, which contains a very useful property called Ports. In that property it lists all the guests that are connected to a port on the portgroup. That would be the solution to find unused portgroups, I thought. But while the vSphere Client also shows powered off guests that are connected, the Port property returned by the Get-VirtualPortgroup cmdlet doesn’t.
So the question at hand required a bit more scripting than I originally thought.
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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.
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After my yadr – A vdisk reporter post I received an email from Dennis Zimmer, known from VMachine blog and as the IcomaSoft CTO. He pointed me to the yUML website and suggested that I could perhaps use part of the yadr script to produce an UML diagram.
As it happended there were already some PowerShell scripts that used the functionality offered by the yUML website to produce UML diagrams. Have a look for example at Use PowerShell and yUML to Create Diagrams by Doug Finke and Create Database Diagrams with Powershell + yUML by Chad Miller.
As you probably guessed by now I was sold to the idea.