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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One of the new features that came with vSphere 4.1 was the ability to use Active Directory Authentication on ESX(i) servers for permissions, console access and ssh access.This is a great feature that you will probably want to activate on all your ESX(i) servers.
Unfortunately this new feature is not available in PowerCLI 4.1. That means you can’t set this up in your configuration scripts through a PowerCLI cmdlet. In most such cases you can fall back on one of the SDK APIs to bypass this lack of a cmdlet. But unfortunately the new “managers”, of which HostActiveDirectoryAuthentication is one, are not available in the VMware.Vim assembly either.
Rob raised this in a recent PowerCLI Community thread. Yasen, one of the PowerCLI Dev Team members, provided a bypass. To make this bypass a bit more accessible, I decided to roll it up in a PowerShell function.
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The New-Datastore cmdlet allows you to easily create VMFS datastores on a free LUN or local disk. But what if you want to create a VMFS datastore on that free partition you have left on a LUN or on a local disk ? These free GBs could come in handy and it’s a shame letting them go to waste. Unfortunately, the New-Datastore cmdlet doesn’t have an option (yet) to handle “free space” partitions.
Exactly such a question was raised by Alasdair in his thread new-datastore on ESX4i Installable local disk in the PowerCLI Community recently.
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Another idea triggered by a post in the PowerCLI Community. Lars wanted to know where his VMs had been running in the past.
Since vSphere doesn’t maintain any historical data with the guests themselves, we have to fall back on the Tasks and Events to create such a report. The basic algorithm to query the tasks, and their related events, is already published in Events – Part 3 : Auditing VM device changes. But to get a historical record of the servers where your guests have been hosted requires a bit more logic in the script.
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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Today Steve Jin published a post called How to Enable ESX Server Logs for Troubleshooting. A very useful tip when you are looking for those hard-to-find “features” in your script.
Steve’s tip reminded me that I have a similar small function in my toolchest to do something similar for the vCenter log.
The function allows you to switch the vCenter log between “warning” and “verbose” on the fly. No need to go into the vCenter client to change the logging option anymore while debugging.
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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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Steve Jin, author of the VMware VI and vSphere SDK: Managing the VMware Infrastructure and vSphere book, recently started his DoubleCloud blog. In a short time span he produced several high quality posts which should be a must-read for every SDK user.
In his latest post, Top 10 Best Practices Using VMware VI and vSphere SDK (part 1), Steve gives invaluable advice for working with the SDK.
Since most of the SDK samples are (still) in Java, and since I know there are quite a few SDK users coming from the PowerCLI world, I decided to write up on some of Steve’s best practices for PowerCLI users.
And I hope Steve doesn’t mind 
Update: I thought it would make it easier for the reader to group all the SDK best practices and tips & tricks together. So I created a dedicated page, see SDK.
Yesterday, Cody published on his Professional VMware blog an excellent article, called vSphere Host Died Abandon Ship! – vSphere vCenter Alarms & Actions.
The article shows a very elegant solution how to move your guests to “safer havens”, the moment one of the hosts in the cluster starts experiencing hardware problems.
The elegance of Cody’s solution is that he uses maintenance mode to force vMotion on all the powered-on guests on the host that experiences HW problems.
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