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Hitchhiker’s Guide to Get-EsxTop – Part 1

The PowerCLI Dev Team gave us an early XMas present yesterday. They released PowerCLI 4.1.1 build 332441 or PowerCLI 4.1 Update 1 as it is called in the Release Notes.

As usual there is a nice collection of new cmdlets and improvements on existing cmdlets in this new PowerCLI 4.1.1 build. Two of the new cmdlets that jump out for me are the Get-EsxCli and the Get-EsxTop cmdlets.

Although both cmdlets are still marked as ‘experimental’, they both open up a complete new area for automation. In this post I’ll have a closer look at the Get-EsxTop cmdlet and what you can do with it.

Continue reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to Get-EsxTop – Part 1 →

Get your tasklog here!

It happens quite often that you launch a PowerCLI cmdlet or a call to a SDK method or a script and that you get a rather cryptic message that something went wrong. One source of information to find out what went wrong are the vCenter’s vpxd log or the ESX(i) server’s hostd log.

But these logs are flooded with messages and it’s often quite hard to find the messages that relate to your task.

When running against a vCenter Server you can set the vCenter’s Logging Options to “Verbose” or “Trivia“. That produces more information in the logs but that often also makes it harder to find/extract the information that belongs to your task. And who has never forgotten to set the the Logging Options back to their original state when done with debugging ?

To make life a bit easier, I wrote a function that automates the above steps. I expanded on a function that I was using privately, and made it more general. This function allows you to retrieve the log entries for one specific or all recent task. The function also allows you to pass a cmdlet, or even a complete script, run the script in an elevated Logging Options mode and returns the task-related log entries.

Continue reading Get your tasklog here! →