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Get the folderpath

A useful property that is obviously missing from the Get-Folder cmdlet, is the path of the folder. In the PowerCLI Community there are regularly threads that ask for this kind of information. Most of the time it concerns scripts to export/import folder structures or scripts to migrate vCenters.

Another property that is obviously missing, is the indication if a specific folder is a so-called “blue” or “yellow” folder.

To solve this problem once and for all, I wrote this short function, called Get-FolderPath, that will return you both of these properties.

Continue reading Get the folderpath →

Automate SIOC

With vSphere 4.1 came 150+ new features. One of these is called Storage IO Control or SIOC.And it has been a very popular subject in the last weeks. Just a small selection of blog posts on the subject:

The only thing missing was a way to automate everything surrounding SIOC. And so I decided to write a couple of functions to fill that gap.

Continue reading Automate SIOC →

Nearly real time monitoring

The VMTN Communities have always been a useful source of inspiration for writing scripts. This week, for example, there was an intriguing question raised in the Onyx Community. The user wanted to know if it was possible to monitor changes in the vSphere environment in real time.

As far as I know there is no API in the vSphere SDK to do real time monitoring. But the EventHistoryCollector can deliver something that I prefer to call nearly real time monitoring. The following script is a very basic function, written primarily to show that this principle of nearly real time monitoring works. The function displays some selected properties of each event it sees.
Continue reading Nearly real time monitoring →

Finding Thin disks

Last Sunday there appeared an interesting thread in the VMTN PowerCLI Community where one the questions was how to find all ‘Thin‘ virtual disks without passing via a virtual machine. The reason for this question was that most of the user’s virtual machines in Lab Manager are not registered on the vCenter Server.

My first idea was to use ‘Get-Datastore | Get-Harddisk‘ and then use the Extensiondata property to query the thinProvisioned property. Something like Arne did in his PowerCLI: Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) info post. But that, unfortunately, doesn’t work since the Extensiondata property is $null in this case.

Continue reading Finding Thin disks →

On parents and nested properties

In a recent post on the vSphere PowerCLI Blog, called New Nested Properties for Navigating to Parent Objects in PowerCLI 4.1, some new features were introduced.

In PowerCLI 4.1 some objects now have, besides the ParentId property, the actual parent object itself. This will take quite some complexity out of several scripts. This is definitely a good improvement.

The 2nd novelty in that post were nested properties. Some SDK object properties are now mapped directly in the PowerCLI object. For example the VMHost object now holds the StorageInfo and NetworkInfo properties besides some others. And what is even better, there is hardly any performance impact since the values will only be loaded the first time you access the properties (similar to the ExtensionData property).

Continue reading On parents and nested properties →

PowerCLI Book Update

As we announced in our post “We’re writing a book!“, Alan and myself started writing a PowerCLI book.

At about the same time Alan got the once-in-a-lifetime oppurtunity to join EMC as a vSpecialist.

Now you don’t become a vSpecialist for free! Alan has been spending a fair amount of time in training, coming up to speed with VCE (VMware/Cisco/EMC) and traveling all over the globe. The little time he was at home, went of course in the first place to his loved ones.

As a consequence, our chapter-writing schedule failed misserably.
So we decided to get some extra help for the book in order to keep our deadline.

And now, for the proverbial “silver lining”, have a look who agreed to help us out:

Glenn Sizemore Jonathan Medd Arnim van Lieshout

Winner of the

Scripting Games 2010

vExpert

 PowerShell MVP
 vExpert

In other words, the book will now be written by “4 vExperts and a MVP” !

Can’t wait to read it 😉

Script vSphere 4.1 AD Authentication

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.

Continue reading Script vSphere 4.1 AD Authentication →

Create VMFS datastores on “free space” partitions

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.

Continue reading Create VMFS datastores on “free space” partitions →

Events – Part 8 – vMotion history

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.

Continue reading Events – Part 8 – vMotion history →

Script ‘esxupdate -query’

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.

Continue reading Script ‘esxupdate -query’ →