HL Tools – Part 1 – Clone a VM without vCenter

In my homelab I try to automate as much as possible. I have a number of scripts and functions that help me setting up test environments in my homelab.  Since I got quite a number of requests on this, I decided to start a series on my homelab tools.

One of the tasks I automated is the provisioning of VMs. Quite easy when you have a vCenter that manages the cloning process. But in layer 1 of my homelab I’m running ESXi standalone on a PaaS provided server, so no vCenter.

With the Copy-DatastoreItem cmdlet it is easy to clone the files of a VM, but this kind of copy doesn’t know about the different types of VirtualDisk you can have in a VM. As a result, your Thin vdisks become Thick vDisks in the clone. The function in this post avoids that problem by using the VirtualDiskManager for copying the VMDK.

clone-vm-no-vc

Note that there are a couple of prerequisites: the master VM needs to be powered off and have no snapshots. And till now I only tested this with VMs that run a Windows guest OS.

Continue reading HL Tools – Part 1 – Clone a VM without vCenter →

Task Data Mining – An improved Get-Task

Quite frequently there are questions in the VMTN PowerCLI Community for scripts that report on the tasks that ran in a vSphere environment.

The PowerCLI pssnapin provides a Get-Task cmdlet, but that only provides information about the recent tasks. An alternative is to use the Get-VIEvent cmdlet and extract all the TaskEvent entries.

But why not use the TaskHistoryCollector and it’s methods ? It provides many filtering options, and since this filtering is done in vSphere itself, this way of working is inherently much faster than using a filter in your script.

In analogy with the Get-VIEventPlus function, I published in my Get the vMotion/svMotion history post, here is the Get-TaskPlus function !

Update February 13th 2020

  • Added logic to break out of do-while loop and destroy the TaskCollector to avoid issues with max 32 collectors

Continue reading Task Data Mining – An improved Get-Task →

HA VM failover tracking

Another interesting question in the PowerCLI Community today.
David wanted to know if it was possible to track which VMs had been failed over to another ESXi host by HA.
With the Get-VIEventPlus function from my Get the vMotion/svMotion history post it is easy to get that informatiom from the Tasks and Events that are kept in the vCenter database.

HA-failover

But which event to look for ?

Continue reading HA VM failover tracking →

Remove old VM monitor dump files

When you need to move the content of one or more datastores, you sometimes stumble upon files that you didn’t know where there. One such type of files are dump files that are stored in a VM’s directory on the datastore.

The files I encountered were named like this:

  • vmware64-core*.gz
  • vmware-vmx-zdump.*

There isn’t a lot of information available on what exactly these files are used for, besides that they seem to be created when the VM Monitor encounters a crash or a serious problem.

Since these files were quite old, and since I didn’t have any open tickets with VMware, I decided to remove these files. But of course in the PowerCLI way with a function 😉

Continue reading Remove old VM monitor dump files →

Get the vMotion/svMotion history

The availability of vMotion and svMotion, provided you have a license that allows it, in vSphere are some of its key features.

The DRS and SDRS functionality will use vMotion and svMotion to better use the available resources.

And you as a vSphere administrator can use it to facilitate your work. Just think of how easy patching or datastorecluster maintenance becomes with the help of these two features.
But as an administrator you want to be able to report on what vMotion and svMotion have been doing over a specific time interval in your vSphere environment.

In the past I already provided a vMotion reporting tool in Events – Part 8 – vMotion history, but now it was time to provide a universal (s)vMotion reporting feature.

motion-reports

Update October 29th 2013: added additional parameters to the Get-VIEventPlus function

  • User: one or more users for which to return the events
  • System: a switch to return all system user events
  • ScheduledTask: return all events for a specific Scheduled Task

Update February 10th 2014: it’s always nice to see another implementation based on one of your scripts. The Opvizor solution will soon contain this function, see Dennis Zimmer‘s post called Storage vMotion Activities Report ! Continue reading Get the vMotion/svMotion history →

Alarm actions – enable – disable – report

Another post triggered by a question in the VMTN PowerCLI community. The user wanted to know how he could create a report that showed for which vSphere entities the alarm actions were disabled.

To set the stage, a short overview of what this is all about. In vSphere you can, since vSphere 4, disable and enable alarm actions for all the managed entities. This option is available from the vSphere client

alarm-action-old-client

and from the vSphere Web client.

alarm-action-web-client

But how to automate these actions, and more importantly in this case, how to report on the active settings ? Like always PowerCLI to the rescue.

Continue reading Alarm actions – enable – disable – report →

Dutch VMUG: The Statistics Reporting Session

I had the pleasure to present a session on “PowerCLI and vSPhere Performance and Capacity reporting” during the Dutch VMUG meeting of February 8th 2013. Although the meeting took place in the “Karnaval” weekend, there was a great turnout and, as always, a very attentive and interested audience. Thanks for attending the session guys !

karnaval

In the session I tried to show how easy it is to produce decent performance and capacity reports about your vSphere environment with PowerCLI. During the session I did some demos to show some aspects of PowerCLI and statistics. This post contains the code, and some annotations, I used during these demos.

Continue reading Dutch VMUG: The Statistics Reporting Session →

dvSwitch scripting – Part 13 – Export/Restore Config

One of the exciting new dvSwitch features in vSphere 5.1 is the ability to export and restore a dvSwitch configuration. This new feature is only available through the vSphere Web Client.

On Hypervisor.fr, a blog you should have in your RSS reader, there were already posts on how to configure the dvSwitch healthcheck and how to do a dvSwitch configuration rollback from PowerCLI. But till now, as far as I know, there were no functions to provide the dvSwitch export/restore functionality.

dvSw-export-import

Time to make this useful functionality available for the “PowerCLI automation crowd” 😉

Continue reading dvSwitch scripting – Part 13 – Export/Restore Config →

Automate your SDRS Anti-Affinity rules

One of the hot new features in vSphere 5 was the introduction of SDRS. And with SDRS came the concept of affinity rules for VMs and VMDKs. Cormac, aka @VMwareStorage, posted a nice overview of the SDRS affinity rules in Storage DRS Affinity & Anti-Affinity Rules.

choice and directions signs

Since then several posts have appeared on the subject of SDRS affinity rules.  To list just a few:

Currently there are no PowerCLI cmdlets to define the inter- and intra-vm anti-affinity rules for SDRS. After a question in the VMTN PowerCLI Community I decided to write a function. This function will allow you to automate the creation of the SDRS anti-affinity rules.

Continue reading Automate your SDRS Anti-Affinity rules →

Find free SCSI LUNs

Another post that comes from a VMTN PowerCLI Community question. Jeff wanted to find the free SCSI LUNs in his environment.
While answering that thread I was amazed there was no PowerCLI function written yet to provide this functionality. At least that was what my friend Google told me 😉

Since there exists a SDK method that makes retrieving free SCSI LUNs quite easy, the function I came up with isn’t too complex.

But it should help you in further automating the setup of your datastores.

Continue reading Find free SCSI LUNs →