vSphere Archives - LucD notes

A Hitchhikers Guide to SRS 1.0.0

Sometimes announcements tend to disappear in the cracks of time. When the Script Runtime Service for vSphere (SRS) 1.0.0 was announced, I had the feeling just that happened.

When version 1.0.0 of this open-sourced (!) product was released, I had expected much more buzz on social media from VMware PowerCLI users.

This appliance does in fact bring an answer to a wish that many PowerShell/PowerCLI users have had for years: a “Scripting Host“!

This Hitchhikers Guide to SRS 1.0.0 post will show how I build my own customised SRS appliance, and how I use it to run PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts.

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How to Mount a Content Library ISO on a VM

While Content Libraries are becoming more and more used, there are still some features that are not yet implemented in PowerCLI. So is it for example not possible to mount an ISO file located in a Content Library on a VM. The Set-CDDrive cmdlet is currently lacking this functionality, while the Web Client offers this option.

Like often, and one of the VMware PowerCLI features I absolutely like, when a cmdlet is missing a feature, you can fall back on the API to solve the issue.

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Crescendo ma non troppo

No, this is not a post about music.

This post will be about my first experiences with the PowerShell Crescendo module, which was just released in Preview 1.

Now, why would I care to write a post about a preview of a module?

The reason is quite simple. This module is, in my opinion, covering something that was missing in PowerShell. Namely the possibility to use native commands, and present the results as objects.

The blog post by Jason Helmick I linked to earlier explains this all in more detail.

What follows are my first, admittedly simple, trials using the Crescendo module. If you don’t want to copy code from this post, I created the VMW-Crescendo repository that contains all the files.

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Cloud-init – Part 3 – Photon OS

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series we used Ubuntu as the guest OS of our target instances. In Part 3 we will show how to use VMware’s Photon OS as our guest OS.

The main reason to use Photon OS is that it is open-sourced, it has a small footprint and it is optimised for VMware vSphere.

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Optimize-VMwarePKS

A guest post

Over the last couple of weeks, it has been my great pleasure to assist Chip Zoller in writing a VMware PowerCLI script, named Optimize-VMwarePKS. This script helps organise your PKS deployment at three levels: folders, tags and DRS rules, including functionality to run a clean up.

The following post by Chip describes the function in greater detail, and shows how you can use it.

This post also appears on the Sovereign Systems website as Optimize-VMwarePKS: A PowerShell Script for All Your VMware PKS Deployment Needs.

Take it away Chip.

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Deploy Photon 2.0 – Part 2

In Deploy Photon 2.0 – Part 1, we showed how to create a Template with the Photon 2.0 guest OS. In Part 2 we will introduce the New-PhotonVM function, which allows to create one or more VMs, based on the template created in Part 1.

The basic concept for the New-PhotonVM function is the same as for the New-PhotonTemplate function. The configuration for the VMs is driven by a JSON file that is passed as an argument to the function.

Continue reading Deploy Photon 2.0 – Part 2 →

Deploy Photon 2.0 – Part 1

Photon 2.0 is definitely a guest OS that is useful in a VMware vSphere environment. It is light-weight, easy to manage, security hardened and comes with the Docker daemon.
That last feature makes it an ideal environment to explore new applications, isolated from your live platforms. As an example, quite a few of us got to know PowerShell Core with VMware PowerCLI, while running it in a Docker container, well shielded from our other platforms.

There are numerous articles and blog posts that describe how set up a Photon 2.0 VM, but most of these use the ovftool or the vSphere Web Client to install it. Followed by quite of a bit of editing config files, to have your Photon 2.0 VM running the way you prefer it.
With the latest version of my Invoke-VMScriptPlus function, you can now automate this entire process, the SDDC way!

Update August 21st 2018

Added “reboot” action
Added optional Environment variables for the customisation scripts
Added Folder field for template destination

Continue reading Deploy Photon 2.0 – Part 1 →

Message to all users, and their reply

Before you need to reboot a VM, or do some destructive maintenance on there, it is a good practice to at least tell the user(s) of that VM what is going to happen. But how do you address the users of a VM? They can be connected to a console (local) or via a RDP session (remote). And how do you get their reply back?

Exactly such a question appeared in the VMTN PowerCLI Community recently. And after some digging, it seems that is possible through a PowerShell script that uses the Remote Desktop Services API, provided through the wtsapi32.dll. Note that the VMs we are looking at, all are running a Windows guest OS.

Continue reading Message to all users, and their reply →

Invoke-VMScriptPlus v2

The ability to execute scripts inside the guest OS of your VMs, is definitely one of the more useful cmdlets available in VMware PowerCLI. A year ago I published the first version of my Invoke-VMScriptPlus function to solve some of the issues the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet has in my opinion.
That function allowed you to run multi-line scripts in a Linux guest OS on your VMs. It also allowed you to use she-bang lines, to indicate which interpreter your script had to run in (bash, perl, python, nodejs, php…). Another handy feature was that you could use Linux here-documents in your scripts.

With the introduction of PowerShell Core (aka PowerShell v6), the lack of support for any Guest OS of the Windows family became obvious. Prompted by a recent thread in the VMTN PowerCLI Community, I decided it was time to publish a new version of my Invoke-VMScriptPlus function.

Update August 21st 2018

Added ScriptEnvironment

Continue reading Invoke-VMScriptPlus v2 →

PowerCLI, REST API and a sample module for Tag management

As most of you might know by now, VMware is moving away from SOAP and going to REST API.

Is this something you should know about? Yes, you should!

In a two-part article on TechGenix, I wrote down my thoughts and observations on REST API. The article goes into what this move towards the REST API might mean for you as a scripter/administrator.

Since an article on coding, without a coding example doesn’t make much sense, I added a module, named rCisTag on the PowerCLI Examples repository.

Articles

Enjoy reading Part 1, Understanding the VMware REST API interface!

and Part 2, SOAP vs REST for performing tasks in VMware environments.